… the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter song, as if it said: “This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.” It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer.
― Willa Cather,  My Antonia

As I scooped up several brown leaves that had fallen into the pool, I said–aloud and with enough volume to startle the finches on the bird feeder–Oh no! It’s coming! Fall, that is. It’s coming whether I like it or not. Granted, it’s supposed to be nearly 100 today. For days, my phone has been alerting me of this heat advisory, and the heat has been brutal, even for August in Iowa. But it’s still pool weather. It’s still shorts and flip flop weather. It’s still summer with its living mask of green that trembles over everything. For me, even as I sweat through days of heat advisory, a handful of brown leaves brings on seasonal melancholy, an acute sadness for loving the loveliness of summer.

It’s not that I don’t love fall with all it’s changing colors and brisk mornings. And it’s not that I don’t understand and appreciate the seasonal cycle of death and rebirth, brown to green. But the older I get, the more I view the coming of autumn as a kind of bitter song, for as Cather writes, the passing of summer with all its light and shadow is a seasonal truth I’d rather not face until I absolutely have to.

In these particularly beautiful lines, poet Pablo Neruda expresses my own sentiments:

We the mortals touch the metals,
the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,
knowing they will go on, inert or burning,
and I was discovering, naming all these things:
it was my destiny to love and say goodbye.

Throughout my life, I’ve often felt as though it’s been my destiny to love and say goodbye. If I’m being honest, it’s not just the challenge of saying goodbye to summer that plagues me, it’s saying goodbye to almost anything and everyone. When I was in elementary school, I remember helping my mom retrieve an ironing board from our basement on the day that one of her friends was leaving town. For whatever reason, my mom was gifting her this ironing board. And for whatever reason, the memory of this day hangs on. I was a child, and this wasn’t even my friend. But the solemnity of this day, the official parting with all its hugs and best wishes, the buds of tears I saw in the corners of my mom’s eyes–I felt all of this profoundly. Saying goodbye was serious stuff, and I carried the weight of these moments for quite some time. Perhaps I carry them still.

In J.D. Salinger’s coming-of-age novel, The Catcher in the Rye, the protagonist Holden Caufield feels this same solemnity. He confesses:

I was trying to feel some kind of good-bye. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t you feel even worse.

Like Holden, when I leave a place–or person–I like to know I’m leaving. That is, I I like a formal leave-taking, an intentional goodbye. I can still see my mom and dad standing on the terrace of our family home, waving as I pulled away to travel the 400 miles back to Iowa, waving until they could see me no more. This is the kind of intentional goodbye that sustained me even as I often cried for the first 30 miles, missing my parents already. I admit that I watch my own children drive down our gravel drive until I can no longer see them. There’s something necessary about fixing my eyes on them for as long as possible, prolonging the passing.

As I write, I sit on my screen porch, the weather having cooled, and the breeze quite lovely. An oriole returns to finish off the last bits of grape jelly in our feeder. He’ll be gone soon, and goldenrod will vanquish the remaining Queen Anne’s lace that grows at the edge of the timber. Time will burnish the world, as it always has. As it must. But I take heart, remembering the words of A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh:

How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.