August is a time of bittersweet transition

August is a transition time. Whether we have children readying for a new school year or not, for many of us, August feels like the approach of summer’s end—no matter what the calendar may claim. Years of experiencing the end-of-summer blues and the annual school supplies shopping trip leave an impression hard to shake, no matter how old we may be. Mostly, this time of year, there’s just something in the air that has the scent of an ending, and then a new beginning, all at once.

The wonderful, tragic poet Sylvia Plath wrote of August as “… the best of summer gone, and the new fall not yet born.” She called it, “the odd uneven time.”

Once, when I was a child, my parents took my sister and me to an amusement park at Surfside Beach. I was very young, but I remember riding on the Ferris wheel with my father, clutching the safety bar across our laps, rocking back and forth as the wheel took us higher. When we reached the apex, the Ferris wheel stopped—later, I’d learned that my father had either asked or paid the operator to do so—and we sat looking out over the Atlantic ocean. The lights of a nearby pier flickered over the undulating water, which was dark and lovely with mystery.

August sits at the top of summer’s Ferris wheel. Everything—June and July—has been the rise to this month, where we hover in these hot weeks, rocking to and fro as if unable or unready to let go, before the wheel creaks to life again, making its inevitable descent into Fall.

I’ve always loved this time. It has a sort of bittersweet joy unrecognizable to children but familiar to those of us who’ve lived a while: a breath-taking, indescribable combination of loss and possibility.

Harper Lee had Scout Finch tell us what many of us already know. That, “summer was our best season,” it was “… everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape.” For children of all ages, summer vacation holds a mysterious expansion—no matter that it only lasts an average eight weeks, depending on where you live. Those weeks, especially in June and July, swell with possibility, and August is the horizon line on the sea, impossible to ever really reach.

The author Sarah Dessen, in her Young Adult novel “Along for the Ride,” speaks with a voice familiar to any once-upon-a-time kid when she says, “In the summer, the days were long, stretching into each other. Out of school, everything was on pause and yet happening at the same time, this collection of weeks when anything was possible.”

It’s true: in summer anything is possible. It is a season that makes many promises. Perhaps, in a sense, August is the payout. Whatever we were lucky enough to earn in the glories of June and July—be they projects completed, experiences had or memories made—August doles out the reward and then slips from the room with a cool so subtle it takes us a while to realize it’s gone.

But before it leaves, August lets us know, just like the inimitable Sam Cooke, that “a change gonna come.” Nature knows it, too. E.B. White, in his childhood classic “Charlotte’s Web,” reveals that, “The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year—the days when summer is changing into autumn—the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.”

I adore E.B. White, but I’m not sure “sad” is the word I’d use for what crickets do. He’s right, however, that their sound does change in August. It becomes a bittersweet thrum, because Fall is coming. We all hear it. Like every rite of passage, we learn when we finally grow up to recognize it for it is. “And summer’s lease,” as Shakespeare asserts, “hath all too short a date.”

Let’s do what we will with August. Float in a lake. Take a personal day from work. Swing in a hammock, get lost in a book until the wee hours of night, pause with coffee cup in hand by our kitchen window—even if we can only spare a moment—and watch the butterflies and hummingbirds flit and spin.

Then let’s ride the Ferris wheel down to the ground together, pay the operator his due for the thrill, and walk out into a new season.

Katherine Scott Crawford is a historical novelist, teacher, hiker and mom who lives in Western North Carolina. Contact her at thewritingscott@gmail.com.