The Summer's Out of Reach

The Friday Newsletter embraces the waning light of summer

When does summer end?

My kid asked me this the other day, and I didn’t have a clear answer. In fact, it’s something I’d been struggling to define in my own head recently. Astrologically, of course, we’ve still got more than a month until summer ends on September 21st. From a meteorological perspective, it’s over on August 31st. For most people in this country, for all practical purposes, it’ll end on Labor Day, when pools close and state fairs end. If we just want to go by the weather, it’ll be summer here in Kentucky until probably the second week of October.

School started for my oldest this week, though, which means—emotionally, at least—summer is already over.

Now, I usually welcome the return of fall. Beyond the obvious—beyond football and sweater weather, beyond crunching leaves and pumpkin-flavored things—it typically signals the return of form, shape and order to our lives. That’s true even this year, when those things have been a little harder to find. Fall is when we put our li…