'Summer is ended, and we are not saved'

How do we get through the dark days? You have to go slowly and, probably, horribly, rely on others.

- ANNE LAMOTT

LABOR DAY announces a new season free of cruel heat and bugs. Instead we have cute sweaters, brisk walks and reason to live.

SCHOOL IS BACK in session and Labor Day approaches, as headlines announce what we nervous cases see as the apocalypse. Summer is too long for me, emotionally. The bright promise of early summer fades and darkens by mid-August.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the desolate people of the Hebrew Bible cried out to the prophet Jeremiah, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved,” and I could have written this yesterday. Those brave people, crying out their hopelessness, looking for direction and consolation. Me? Footage of the National Guard often sends me to my room with Mexican food, the latest issue of People magazine and my emotional support cat.

I too was hoping we'd have been saved by now, by a fiery yet pleasant orator who could lead this nation back to compassion, to being a Union again, but nope. Negatory. Lots of heroic people but no Gregory Peck or Sigourney Weaver.

This has been quite disappointing.

Early summer had arrived with high hopes, the first weeks of June when the air felt like a gentle warm stroke that said, “This is an ideal climate that I’m giving you right now, so rest into it and dig it.”

Everything was in bloom, the gardens and the bushes filled with flowers, millions of people turning out for the peaceful rallies — and I could go for walks in the redwood groves without turning into clammy grandma pudding. Middle summer was still doable, my husband's roses still blooming.