How did it go so fast?

I stare down the gun-barrel of Labor Day and see summer’s impending end.

Wasn’t last week the middle of July?

Too suddenly my children are ready to board the bus to school–one for his final year.

Not ready! I wish to slow this race from budding tulips and warm whispers of spring to chilly nights and autumn’s falling leaves.

Is this all we get before snow flies?

The last weekend of summer comes too fast for each of us, I suspect.

To fill these final days, my husband and I hauled our kids to my mom’s in Connecticut.

After a day with cousins, we explored the Brooklyn Fair, the oldest in the USA, to ride George Washington Ferris’s wonderful wheel, admire the animals, and race hand-hewn vegetable cars while indulging farm fantasies.

Sunday evening, after a four-hour drive, we arrived home to a crock-pot of simmering meatballs and sandwich rolls delivered by a neighbor.

Filling my plate, I was reminded that no matter the lateness of the year, each day holds a surprise waiting to be discovered.

These broad-shouldered boys tossing their gifts at life like rings at a carnival game,

This long-haired daughter, modeling a frog,

These small ones still wide-eyed at the oily ear of a sheep and the fast spinning wheels of a cucumber car,

Have still so much to discover.

Summer ends.

Seasons change,

But life is just beginning.

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven,” Ecclesiastes 3:1.