Summer might as well be a person, I miss her so palpably. I wonder where the green skipped off to, why the fields are crusty and bare, if the sun really exists behind that blank stare of a grey sky. Like mourning a lover, I revisit the same spots, driving the shared roads, only feeling the absence like an ache in my heart.

The lover metaphor is apt because you only miss someone that much if you've had an unforgettable time with them, if they haunt your memory. And this summer was unforgettable. For one thing, I had more free time this summer than I've had since I was twelve. I got to garden, read indiscriminately, go to the beach, wear the same shorts for five days in a row

Remember the days before part-time jobs, before your parents decided that, hey! you have two arms and two legs! you could help put some pennies in the piggy bank!? Remember the smell of chlorine hitting you like a wave as you opened the gate to the community pool, the ecstatic screams of onehundredandfifty kids, the heat of the concrete as you sprinted to the cool blue? Remember days when you couldn't wait to keep working on your teepee, sky filtering through leaves as you bent over branches the size of your ankle, trying to hack them with your flimsy penknife saw because your dad didn't trust you with the real handsaw (it was just as dull as your knife, but a lot rustier; your mom worried about tetanus)? Remember visiting Grandma and playing in the barn loft, building a house out of hay bales and sorting through your grandpa's odd collection of old magazines stored in mildewed boxes?

Okay, maybe those aren't your memories. Actually, they're mine. It's been a long time since I revisited them. But this summer, after the haze of classes and work diminished, I got to be a kid again. And it was awesome.

November comes down like the big eraser from the sky and wipes summer away, all traces of her vanished except the confused longing and the weary knowledge that it will be a full six months before she returns. Six long cold months. And sure, there will be snow; that helps, at least until driving turns it grey and frothy. And holidays; nothing cheers me up like Christmas music, and, lucky me, Cat Country plays it nonstop from November through December. Those pagans sure were smart to schedule Christmas during a season when everyone could use a little eggnog and mistletoe to warm them up--not to mention oversized holiday-themed sweaters.

I've got to go somewhere warm for my doctorate. I hear Buenos Aires is nice this time of year.