Ode to summer

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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Citizen-Times columnist Susan Reinhardt had a very nice ode to the passing of summer in today’s paper. You should check it out. Here’s a few of my favorite passages:

If I could freeze-frame a slice of time, it would have to be this past week of blue-skied grace. …

Maybe there are summer people, fall people, winter and spring people. If so, I’m a summer, and seeing tarps covering sparkling swimming pools, watching the sun clock out earlier each evening and hearing the diminishing melody of the insect’s nightly choir rehearsals drapes my mood in melancholy.

I held my daughter’s sticky hand the other night as we walked the neighborhood during one of these picture-perfect evenings.

“I don’t like this time of year,” I said and she stopped in her tracks, put her hands on her hips like a mother preparing to scold.

“You should,” she said. “Autumn is when we get to go to the fair and have Halloween and be with our families at Thanksgiving.”

Leave it to a 7-year-old to put the world into perspective.

So I’m trying harder to appreciate the shift changes four times a year.

Days don’t get any better than this, even when one sees the signs of change: the confetti of dried leaves whirling in the air, the grass turning hard and brown, the flowers along window boxes struggling to stay alert, offering their pink and red smiles. …