Labor day is approaching and I’m realizing that the transition from August to September is a deceptively great time of year. It’s not like Halloween or Christmas when there are parties and your going to get stuff. It’s not Thanksgiving when you get to gorge yourself on food. It’s not even like Memorial Day when summer’s on the way and the weather ostensibly starts being nice.

I think it’s the pictures that my friends are posting of their kids going back to school that’s making me think about this. I also think that I’m in a place where it’s cool and there are pine trees and it’s starting to feel like fall.

My hatred of summer has grown over the course of my life. I’m much more bothered by the heat now but when I was a kid, August was the worst because it represented the death of summer. All of my soccer was done. If I went on a bike ride, it seemed like all the fields were abandoned. And the specter of another school year loomed large.

I remember the summer in between sixth and seventh grades, I was full of twelve year old ennui and I kept listening to Don Henley’s “The End of the Innocence” over and over and, like, really getting it.*

Even though I never appreciated it when I was younger, I loved new school clothes and the start of a new school year. New teachers and new subjects and that honeymoon period where school didn’t stress me the hell out. That feeling continued when I got older and started heading back to college to a dirty mansion full young men given far more freedom than they deserved and I convinced myself that this would be the year that I really studied.

I also just love the transition into fall. It suits me and it’s not just the weather. People are more settled when autumn comes around, unlike the perpetual FOMO of summer where I just feel strange that I’m not going anywhere and not loving going to whatever beach everyone else seems to be going to. But fall? I don’t know. It’s pretty much about leaves turning and apple picking and farmer’s markets and corn mazes. I get to wear flannel and I don’t have to take my shirt off in front of strangers.

And I just want to mention this one last odd detail about approaching autumn that I’ve always loved since childhood. It’s the smell of tar. Yeah, I know it’s weird but in my neighborhood people would always seal their driveways for the winter with tar. It’s this sensory detail that I’ve always remembered, along with the empty canisters and the used brooms caked with tar that blocked off a driveway from kids riding their bikes on it like a weird suburban skull and crossbones.

It’s still August now but Labor Day is a few days away. As always, I’m ready to say goodbye to summer.