The Last Days of the Summer Vacation Were Always the Worst

The last days of summer vacation were not really summer vacation.

Not in the way June was.

June felt endless. The school year had just released its grip, and the first few weeks of freedom seemed too large to measure. There were bike rides, sleepovers, swimming pools, baseball games, afternoon cartoons and entire days with no real plan.

August was different.

By late August, you were still technically free. But the freedom had an expiration date, and suddenly there were reminders everywhere.

The new school supplies were sitting on the kitchen table. A backpack still wearing its store tags leaned against a chair. New shoes waited in a box. Your mother had already started talking about getting back on a normal sleep schedule.

The clock was running out.

School Supplies Were the First Warning

There was something exciting about choosing school supplies. A fresh box of crayons. Sharpened pencils. New folders with sports cars, cartoon characters or whatever happened to be popular that year. A clean Trapper Keeper, if you were lucky. Maybe even a new lunchbox that you could not wait to show everyone.

For a few minutes in the store, the newness could almost make going back to school sound good.

Then you got home.

The bags were unloaded, and everything landed on the kitchen table. That was when those supplies stopped being new toys and became evidence.

Summer was ending.

They might sit there for several days while your parents sorted through lists, wrote your name inside notebooks and tried to determine why any child needed quite so many glue sticks. Every time you walked through the kitchen, there it was: a small pile of proof that Monday morning was coming.

The Final Week Never Felt Completely Free

You tried to enjoy it, of course.

You went outside. You rode your bike. You stayed at the pool until your fingers wrinkled. You played one more game in the backyard and tried to squeeze another sleepover into the schedule.

But the countdown followed you.

Five more days.

Then four.

Then somebody would say, “This is your last Friday before school starts,” which was not information any child needed.

Even Sunday afternoon felt different. The daylight was still warm and the neighborhood still looked like summer, but the whole day had the unmistakable atmosphere of a sentence about to be carried out.

At some point, an adult would tell you to come inside early because you had school in the morning.

That may have been the cruelest part. Summer did not end when the first bell rang. It ended the evening before, when you were called inside while there was still enough daylight left to play.

August Even Looked Different

Late August had its own color.

The lawns were not as green as they had been in June. The baseball fields were dusty. The afternoon sun looked a little lower. Cicadas buzzed loudly in the trees, as if summer itself knew it had only a few days left.

Stores had already moved on too. The inflatable pools and lawn chairs were pushed into a clearance aisle while notebooks, binders and back-to-school clothes took over the front of the building.

Television commercials joined the conspiracy. Every few minutes, another cheerful group of children appeared on screen looking suspiciously happy to be shopping for jeans and pencils.

No actual child was that excited about an alarm clock.

Then Came the Night Before School

The night before the first day was a strange mixture of dread and possibility.

Your clothes were laid out. The backpack was packed. Lunch plans had been discussed. You wondered which teacher you would get, who would be in your class and whether the summer had somehow changed everyone while you were apart.

There was usually a promise that this year would be different.

You would keep your desk organized. You would not wait until Sunday night to start a project. You would use every section of the expensive binder your parents bought. You might even get up when the alarm went off instead of requiring several increasingly irritated visits from a parent.

Most of these plans lasted until sometime around Wednesday.

But that night, lying in bed much earlier than you had in months, the school year felt enormous. Morning seemed to be approaching much too quickly, even when sleep refused to cooperate.

We Were Mourning More Than Summer

As children, we probably would have said we simply did not want to go back to school. That was true, but it was not the whole truth.

What we hated was losing control of our days.

Summer meant waking up without an alarm. It meant eating lunch when you got hungry, not when a bell told you to. It meant wandering over to a friend’s house, inventing a game and staying outside until the streetlights came on.

School brought schedules, homework, permission slips, packed lunches and adults announcing what happened next.

The last days of summer vacation were our first annual lesson in how quickly freedom can disappear.

We did not have the words for that feeling yet. We only knew that the school supplies were waiting on the kitchen table and that we wanted time to slow down.

The Feeling Never Completely Goes Away

Most adults no longer get a summer vacation with a clearly marked beginning and end. Work continues through June, July and August. Monday arrives every week whether we have a new backpack or not.

Still, late August can bring the old feeling back.

Maybe it is the angle of the evening sun. Maybe it is the sound of cicadas or the sight of school buses practicing their routes. Maybe it is walking into a store and seeing rows of notebooks beneath giant back-to-school signs.

For a second, you are a kid again.

You are still technically free. There are still a few warm evenings left. Your bike is in the driveway, your friends are somewhere nearby and the streetlights have not come on yet.

But the new school supplies are sitting on the kitchen table.

And you know the clock is running out.