Summer? What Summer?

With one week until Labor Day, summer is nearly over. June and July’s cool wet weather pattern put many ambitious projects and plans well behind schedule this summer.

Farm chores were delayed by rain – all that mowing, haying, tilling and weeding. Weekend plans to paint the porch and cut cordwood were washed away. The sodden woodlot has been swarming with hordes of hungry mosquitoes. The skid trails still as muddy as May.

The sweet corn is stunted and the green beans are late. New Hampshire gardeners lament that the always-too-short growing season, was particularly-so this year.

But wild blueberries have produced a bumper crop. And I recently discovered sun-kissed clusters of ripening wild grapes on vines growing along a favorite dirt road.

Like the proverbial fox in Aesop’s “Sour Grapes” fable who couldn’t reach high hanging grape vines overhead, I declare “those grapes are probably sour anyway!” By September, I surrender. I find myself almost wishing summer away.

Soon cold nights will end worries about garden weeds. Asters will fade. The first frost will kill Sensitive Fern fronds and wither the Summer Squash vines – and hopefully those mosquitoes.

The tumbled backyard stonewall, the unturned compost pile and un-split blocks of rock maple firewood will soon disappear beneath a carpet of fallen leaves.

“The first snow will be a mercy this year” I tell myself, a pale death shroud to obscure the remnants of unfinished summer chores.

Summer? Ha!
I’ll be glad to see it go…

But come next January, what would I give for just one perfect August afternoon at the beach?