Where did the summer go?

The Rio Blanco County Fair has started and I am not ready. It’s a time change thing. It is not as if I have any real reason to complain, as my only role is to attend. It has always been an end-of summer tradition. The annual event signaled the conclusion of the summer to teachers everywhere. Now that it begins weeks earlier, I find myself muttering, “Where did the summer go?”

I never entered anything to be exhibited, as a kid or grown-up. While it may be true that I didn’t grow up in a rural area, I enjoyed walking through the exhibit halls and animal barns each year, as well as taking in all of the accompanying sights and sounds of the participants. Now that it starts here at the end of July, I find myself complaining about how the summer zoomed by, like the whirly bird ride at the carnival that was an integral part of my childhood county fairs.

I do not like these kind of calendar changes, as it seems to affect my psyche. Summer has always included a looser schedule or no schedule at all. All summer long, I worked on school projects and took classes to keep up with my teaching certification, I was more relaxed filled with the feelings of freedom that lasted from the time school got out mid-June and didn’t start until after Labor Day.

I never felt as if I had to have a project ready until the fall. It was my teaching friends who understood this completely. Their lives were ruled by the school calendar. Eventually school districts in every region of the country made these changes so that their official starting date was long before Labor Day and ended by Memorial Day.

It is unsettling. You, too, might find yourself muttering about time passing too quickly, or arguing with someone about how things have always been. I liked to think that I and the rest of my generation was never going to get to this cranky, curmudgeonly stage about time and date changes. The only thing I can think of to say about this is “Phooey” or “Dadgummit”. There is no way I can zoom forward if I am moving back in time.