Tempus fugit, along with all the other Latin I have forgotten from high school. I was innocently wandering through the grocery store yesterday, through the produce department and its display of fancy cantaloupes that were neatly piled in bespoke net bowling ball bags, past the deli section, and around the corner toward the Gatorade aisle, when my eye wandered over to a sale wall. I expected to see back-to-school items – it’s almost the best time of the year, isn’t it? Maybe there would be piles of granola bars, or Bluey-themed water bottles. What I saw was even more horrifying: Halloween candy. It’s a million stinking degrees outside, there are hurricanes lurking off the coast of Africa, the hydrangeas are brown and panting for rain, but corporate America has determined a new timeline for me: now I need to confront the immediate future, which is candy corn and tiny 3 Musketeers bars. Where has summer gone?
We have two and a half months to live through before Halloween. To be honest, I am always in the camp that remembers to pick up the candy for trick or treating along about October 29th or 30th. The pickings are slim by then – which is why for the last couple of years I have done our Halloween candy shopping at Aldi – the tempting P.O.P. full-size Snickers bars were $1.19 each last year (though who knows what the tariffs will be doing to chocolate prices this year) and I could afford to be a neighborhood legend for the nearly half dozen children who come to our house. I am not about to spend money on candy corn and tiny 3 Musketeers bars in AUGUST.
No sirreebob. I am going to clutch and grasp at all the summer straws I have neglected thus far. I am going to make some lemonade from scratch. I am going to sit on the back steps and spit watermelon seeds out onto the lawn. I am going to Dairy Queen for a soft serve ice cream that will melt all over my hand and down my arm, and it will drip off my sticky elbow.
I haven’t shucked enough corn this summer, have you? I need to make more cole slaw. I haven’t shelled any peas, or strung enough beans. When did I last have a piña colada? College? (Why on earth do we have a blender now if not to remember our misspent youth, when we made frozen drinks using a blender and the convenient electrical outlet found in the baseball bleachers at Washington College?)
A couple of weeks ago Mr. Sanders and I were in Boston. Oysters were slurped. Lobster rolls were inhaled. Drawn butter was splashed everywhere. Baseball and hot dogs and French fries and Italian ice. That’s summer.
The farmers’ markets are burgeoning with perfection: peaches, pears, plums, watermelons, beans, berries, sunflowers, squash, zinnias, zucchini. Carpe diem, baby.
Spiked Watermelon Lemonade – let us kill a few birds with this stone.
I don’t see how I can possibly contemplate the idea of buying Halloween candy when I have yet to melt my own fingerprints while eating a scalding hot s’mores concoction. How can I move through the seasons without having had cotton candy? Or kettle corn? (Pro tip: kettle corn is a fabulous morning treat to nibble on while circling the farmers’ market on a Saturday. Just as healthy, I suspect, as Cap’n Crunch cereal, and just as disgustingly deelish.)
Sadly, my annual gardening ambition has not played out successfully. I am going to have to admit to defeat in growing tomatoes. We started out with four tomato plants. We are now down to three. The total harvest has been two tomatoes. Two. One tomato’s life cycle zipped from green, to rotten, overnight. The second tomato is still sitting on the kitchen window sill, readying itself to reach perfection while I am asleep one night this week. I am not enjoying much return on my investment. Another foolish summer romance. I will have to rely on the kindness of strangers, who can actually grow tomatoes, at the farmers’ market. I still aim to get my fill of summertime tomato sandwiches, with thick slices of sun-warmed tomatoes, and some tall frosty glasses of lemonade. Yumsters!
Go make some hay while the sun shines. Back-to-school and Labor Day are nearly here. Resist the siren song of Halloween candy corn. Can sweater weather and Christmas be far off?
“Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape.”
—Harper Lee
Jean Dixon Sanders has been a painter and graphic designer for the past thirty years. A graduate of Washington College, where she majored in fine art, Jean started her work in design with the Literary House lecture program. The illustrations she contributes to the Spies are done with watercolor, colored pencil and ink.
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