Summer’s end

When summer’s end is nighing

And skies at evening cloud,

I muse on change and fortune

And all the feats I vowed

When I was young and proud.

I recalled the opening line of this poem by AE Housman from my literature class, and just had to look it up (oh, the wonders of Google!). The poem, “When summer’s end is nighing,” is from Housman’s 1922 collection “Last Poems.”

What occasioned this bit of nostalgia was the onset of the habagat, the southwesterly winds, signaling the impending rainy season and the end of summer. I don’t need to wait for PAGASA’s announcement; living way up there the shift in wind direction is unmistakable. Last Tuesday the wind started whistling through my west-facing sliding doors, and the music from the wind hasn’t stopped.

Yes, it’s still hot, but the sunlight is being tempered these days by gathering clouds, so that my eyes don’t hurt as much from the glare when I look out the window in the morning.

Summer’s end means the start of a new school year. Classes in public schools all over the country open next Monday, and classes in private schools start soon after that. At the risk of sounding terribly selfish, this means the end of clear streets and an easy 40-minute drive to work and the start of crowded streets and traffic jams.

It is too much of a cliché to say that time flies by so quickly, but it does – seems like we were just taking down the Christmas wreath on the door, and now five months of the year have gone by. Perhaps it’s age that makes me want to take things at a slower pace, not to have to rush head long through each day, to have time to do all the things that must be done, and time left over to do the things that do not have to be done but which I want to do.

Let me share two more stanzas from Housman, as he writes not only of the end of summer but of time that “come no more anew.”

The year might age, and cloudy

The lessening day might close,

But air of other summers

Breathed from beyond the snows,

And I had hope of those.

They came and were and are not

And come no more anew;

And all the years and seasons

That ever can ensue

Must now be worse and few.

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. I John 3:16-20