The sigh of the end of summer

It's a gorgeous, beautiful, stunning, sparkly, sunny day in DC. And it makes me a little nervous.

This is the beginning of the early mornings where you feel the faint cool of end of summer, where the earliest edge of fall kisses you ever so gently when you walk out the door. It's subtle, and if you're not looking for it, you could easily overlook it.

And these mornings glide into lovely golden days. They're beautiful, truly. But I can't appreciate them as fully as I'd like to.

It's not that I don't love this weather - I do. How can you not love full-on sunshine with no humidity? It's the kind of day that feels amazing to be out and about in, and that you can exercise endlessly in without drowning in your own sweat. It's amazing.

But summer, summer is my favorite season. It's not that I don't like fall. It's a perfectly good season in itself. But it's pre-winter. And winter, winter is not my friend.

I realize it's not going to happen overnight. We're going to be eased into it. But the easing for me is like, well, it's like in a movie (or occasionally real life) when you are watching a scene play out, or maybe you're even participating in it, and it begins to dawn on you that something bad is going to happen. You get that slow dread feeling in your stomach. That's sort of what fall is like for me.

It's the light more than anything. This fall light, which begins to slant, makes everything a little paler. And there's less of it. The light, I mean. Not everything.

Summer for me is is all about light and bold colors. The sun is strong, sometimes even too harsh, and shadows are sharp and dark. Flowers are flashes of bright, just begging to be appreciated. And people, I think, mimic nature, and don clothing of a much more colorful and whimsical nature than in any other season. Summer is color and motion and light. Not to mention heat, which I can never get enough of.

The crepe myrtle, which blooms late summer, and is on its way out now, comes out in some of the loveliest, strongest pinks and purples. It always feels to me like those trees are blooming their vividly colored hearts out in a sort of goodbye parade for summer. "Whoo-hoo! Yippee! We're gorgeous! We love you! Oh, you're going? OK! Bye! Come back again next year!"

Me, I'm looking around thinking, "No, don't go! I love the light! I love the bright! I love the too hotness of the days and nights. I love the daylight that goes on forever! Don't go!"

This is my sigh of the end of summer.