A Flock of Geese Flew South This Morning, Over My Head, and My Internal Summer Thermometer Screamed, !NO!

I’m not ready for fall.

I am loath to break out the sweaters and boots. To have to wear socks. To plan great crocks of chili and the darkness being pulled over earlier and earlier, like a down blanket at bedtime and no one is sleepy.

The kids start school in three weeks. Boy-child worried last night about who his third-grade teacher would be, and then I started worrying about who would be in his class, if his teacher would appreciate his kind heart and open maw for learning. If that big kid who doesn’t realize how strong he is would tackle him repeatedly at touch football…like last year. Could I still chaperone their outings, would there be time for me to be in the classroom, to work in the library. I’m having one of those dreams about being in school and missing a test, and realizing it’s not me, but some weird connection with my children and their fears are still mine.

Girl-child is going to kindergarten. She’s ready, she’s reading up a storm, and so, so curious, and she’ll do fine, I keep telling myself, she’ll be amazing and charming and she won’t take any shit from anyone, but please don’t let her talk back to the teacher like she talks back to me, and make sure the boys are nice and the girls especially so. Will she be okay in the lunchroom, it’s so loud? Will she be okay on the playground, the bigger kids running around and around the younger? I have to distance myself from worry, but I’m wearing it like a furry coat, stuck to me like Velcro.

It’s too warm. It’s too sunny. I’m not done with summer. It hasn’t even begun for me. I want to lie on a blanket in the grass and hear the cicadas whirring, and feel the ants crossing my sweaty legs, just a hill here, a hill there, on their way to food in tall blades of grass. I want to drink gallons of iced tea, and pick strawberries in the patch. I want to watch my kids playing in the surf of some big lake, rub sunscreen over their pink backs, slosh through the sand to buy ice-cream-drumsticks that crumble chocolate bits all over our faces.

I want to fall asleep to warm night air ruffling my humid sheets, to croaking frogs, to tell the temperature counting the crickets legs moving like violin bows.

I am not ready for summer to end.