Staying on this side of the bridge

Again, as it is every year, September creeps in.  The sun rises later and sets sooner.  It’s light comes from a slightly different angle and seems softer, a bit more golden.  The people around me begin to load the kids’ bikes onto the bike racks and head home, as I have done for probably fifteen of the thirty years that we have owned this place by the bay.  More traffic is driving off the Cape than on to it.

To this feeling of an ending, this slight sadness, the melancholy that comes as the last days of a New England summer slip away, Mother Nature usually adds a touch of cool air to let everyone know that it is time to put on another layer and get serious..  It helps make the transition.  But this year the heat and humidity have lingered.  The Labor Day holiday is late, and with it, summer is hanging on.

This afternoon I took the kayak out onto the bay. There was a breeze coming across the water blowing away some of the heat.  It created little swells for me to bounce over.  There were very few boats around.  Almost all of them were working boats, picking up the lobster traps so that the folks who held off their vacations until the last week could have their fresh, local, lobster dinners. I was out on the water alone with the sea gulls and cormorants. I let the breeze do most of the work of taking me home.

This is the second summer that my wife and I have been down here the whole time.  We don’t work during the summer any more. Fortunately, it is by our choice that we hardly have much paid work at all.  In many ways, we are playing our own “September Song.”

It’s our kids who come down for weekends, or for a few of their vacation days.  Now they bring their kids.  We are starting on a third generation coming to this small house, a short walk to the beach.  The grandkids get there in their strollers. The oldest of them are learning to bounce on the waves on boogie boards, and to build sand castles to try and stop the tides.

It’s the unbroken chain of our lives playing out, as it does for so many families who have summer traditions that cement that feeling of family, caring and continuity.  There is a family down the street that all come together for the Fourth of July and again for Labor Day.  They have parents, four sons, their wives, their ex-wives, their  kids and some cousins.  They are a volatile family of arguments and strife, but no one wants to give up the summer, so they come back twice a year and do it all over again.

One of our families traditions is that we never had a TV down here.  It allows us to feel that the whole world is beautiful, prosperous and fun. When we drive over the bridge next week we will again be confronted with the total absurdities and lunacy that have plagued our species since we divided into tribes, or since Cain and Able, which ever you prefer.

We all know that it should be, and could be different, but it never is. So we try to stay on this side of the bridge for as long as we can.