Forgive us our obsession with the New England weather and its nuances.
However, we are endlessly fascinated by the weather. Watching the weather and measuring its heartbeat is almost as interesting as being inside the chambers of the State House watching an expanded gambling bill die a horrible death on Beacon Hill.
The summer of 2010 will likely go down as the hottest, sunniest, driest, most cloudless summer season in recorded history.
July was already declared the hottest in the history of weather record keeping.
Now we are in August, with more than a full month of beach going or drives to the lakes and mountains of New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine in front of us.
It is a good feeling, all that summer still in front of us.
For New Englanders used to the whimsical nature of the summer season, five weeks of summer remaining is a veritable eternity.
And all of this coming on the heels of one of the worst summers in history – that is the summer of 2009 – makes the turnaround this season all that sweeter and memorable.
We New Englanders live among the cherished memories of sweet and ruined summers past.
All of our summers are made sweet by the weather or are ruined by it; the summers, that is, and the memorable events of our lives which coincide with them.
Summer is often the time to meet and to fall in love. Regrettably, it is also the time to fall out of love and to be as lonely as one has ever been watching others delighting in their relationships at the beach or at outside restaurants or during late night strolls wherever such human interaction is taking place.
Summer is also a time, and a state of mind, when each day should be taken one at a time, keeping always in mind that winter is not too far away.
We all live with romantic memories of summers coming and of summers past.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, we believe, says it best about everything that came before and about everything awaiting us.
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.