It hits me

every year. I sit and watch the pale sunlight fade in the ever quickening evenings of summer and a sense of sadness settles. How few are the summers of our lives! And the summers I hold in my mind now a memory and nothing more. The daisy fields at Aunt Emma's, the breakfast tables laden with tasty pork and fresh summer's fruit, the lazy afternoon dance of the dragonflies on the branch down the hill from the barn. It wasn't my home (it was my mom's) and yet the memories tend to gather there. And then a shift a few miles down the road: Sissy and I venturing to the spring house at Grandma Bess's in search of peanut butter. The little lizards that populated the spring itself and the water that tasted sweeter and better than any other on God's green earth. Fields of black-eyed susans. Driving past Ralph's old place in such a state of disrepair. Mom's dire warnings about the "black racers" that would chase you down if we ventured too near the run. Then suddenly back to the Old House.  One blessed evening when the cousins were all together and playing hide and seek in the woods as the lightning bugs flashed here and there and as it grew darker the whippoorwills singing  (but George and I were too little to participate and just heard their voices as we hung out on the front porch). Sigh. Blessed and wonderful memories. Faces long since vanished, or changed by the ravages of time. Random thoughts on the fading light of a summer's day.