...that sometimes the abundant excessiveness of summer can become, well, excessive.

"But now in September the garden has cooled, and with it my possessiveness. The sun warms my back instead of beating on my head ... The harvest has dwindled, and I have grown apart from the intense midsummer relationship that brought it on."
- Robert Finch

Here in the Midwest, where summer doesn't begin to roll up it's sleeves and really get down to business until sometime in the middle of May, it always seems we are behind from the get-go. Like after so many months of dreary, unchanging, inhospitable Fall, Winter and Spring we are desperate to take full advantage of the nice weather. And we are caught in a game of catch-up.

If I've heard it once, I've heard it 17 million times..."There just isn't enough time to fit in all the summer stuff we had planned."

For there are church picnics and backyard cook-outs, Holiday fireworks and parades; camping, canoeing, fishing and hiking; neighborhood baseball games and tennis championships and rec. league soccer matches. In between all that fun the lists of must-get-to garden chores and lawn chores and outdoor housework chores seem to have no limit. Indeed, we spend all day outdoors, getting up at first light in the cool, quiet air on mornings when the sun rises earlier and earlier. And, likewise, we go to bed later and later, waiting for that same blazing sun to sink slowly away and the fireflies to illumine the still, humid air. We swim whenever we're near water. We eat ice cream every chance we get. We live in shorts and flip flops and sunglasses and slick ourselves over with so much sunscreen we might slip out of your grasp if you tried to hug us. We eat strawberries and watermelon and cherries and peaches until we can bear to eat no more. We devour in-season sweetcorn and tomatoes as though making up for lost time. (Which indeed, we are.) We plan family vacations and long weekends and road trips; often stacking them one on top of another until we haven't spent a full week at home in who knows how long.

And then we wonder, when that first sharp, crinkling, crackling hint of fall shows up one night in a cool evening breeze and the back-to-school supplies sit out on the counter and suddenly the porch light automatically trips on at quarter to 8, why we are oddly enough, ready for a rest.

A return to normal. A slowed down, paced existence. A schedule.

Growing up I always thought of Fall as the "dying" season. Though my favorite, there was, lurking in the background, that bittersweet notion of it being one big, drawn out goodbye; to all of the above mentioned things. Everything that had seemed so vibrant and full of life just a few short weeks ago suddenly begins to dull and brown and age. And while there's always so much beauty in that, there is also sadness. And grief.

But after reading a book about the seasons of gardening this spring I realized I had been looking at it wrong. It is not only us who are anxious for a bit of a rest come September. It is nature, too.

And that's what Fall is, I guess. A rest. Or more, a gradual wind down to a rest. Just like in any relationship, that crazy, dizzy, passion-filled rush of first love can only be expected to last so long, lest you self-destruct. And so, too, in nature, can the "intense midsummer relationship" last only so long.

So as the days grow short and the nights longer, as the blackbirds line the telephone wires and the geese fill the tempestuous skies with their loud calls, as the leaves begin to blush with color and the flowers in my garden grow gangly and sun-starved and weird, I will chose to look upon it all not as the end of something. Or even as the beginning of something else. But as a hard-earned, well-deserved rest.