Summer Farewell

The canoe, kayak and cornhole boards brought up from the beach, the bikes back in the basement, the clothes in the closet stuffed in the suitcase—it’s time to go. My wife will stay another 10 days with a new group of people coming up who care not for canoeing, kayaking, cornhole or biking, but will enjoy their own ways of being at the beach in the last weeks of summer. 

 

Me, I’ll be settling back in in San Francisco with no trips planned until mid-October. Back to my routines there in the best season in that marvelous city. Opera in the Park, Comedy in the Park, Flower Piano, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass and other annual delights await, with summer fog (hopefully) gone and winter rains yet to arrive. Some little projects eagerly await me (getting my 12^th book out, preparing for my Flower Piano gig), others less delightful demand my attention (the complicated fiasco of my book publishing business). Happy to return to Trader Joes, Tartinne bread and cooking in my own kitchen, walks in my Golden Gate Park backyard, reunions with friends and colleagues. 

 

Meanwhile, my flight leaves in five hours and hoping for one more walk up Sugarbowl dune and one more swim in Lower Herring Lake. It has been a most marvelous three weeks reviving my biking-hiking-swimming body and remembering my summer self with my teacher identity laid to the side. But all good things must pass. Or from another point of view, the baton of one good thing is passed to the next and the new runner carries it further around the track. 

 

Though technically it’s another month until summer officially ends, this my farewell to that still-delightful season.