Party's Over, Folks!

It's happened.  Each year there is that moment when Summer looks around with bleary eyes and says, "That's it for me; it's been a great party, but I need to go home and get some sleep." It isn't that Fall is here, it's a fading of leaves, weeds gone to seed, a slant and color to the light that shows the smudged mascara, tangled hair and wrinkled clothes of a party girl who has had too much. But this year it seems too soon.  Did Hurricane Irene (which was a tropical storm when it reached us) kick Summer in the arse even while wreaking such havoc and destruction just a few miles from us? Certainly Irene tore even green leaves from the trees, leaving them far too underdressed for this time of year. Anyone who knows me knows that I love Fall, and have little fondness for Summer.  But this year the energy feels different...it's not time yet.  Mama Nature has aged; she's creaky, and wrinkled, too tired to get up and face another day.  Perhaps she's feeling guilty about the hundreds of homes she destroyed, the lives taken by that cataclysmic tempest in a teapot of mountain villages.

Or hey, maybe it's just that too much rain and wind has simply left the trees stressed.  Maybe the little gray cloud that's been haunting me of late is oozing into how I interpret the energy of this seasonal cusp.  It just seems as though the clock is racing, calendar pages keep flipping, apples are in season before the tomatoes ever reached their prime, and we're all in a race whose finish line seems obscure, here one moment, miles away the next....