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Recently: 8/30/07

Posted on August 30, 2007 by Staff

By Valarie Schwartz

Like the poplar leaves starting to pile as the drought yellows and drops them to the ground, people are starting to pile around town.

First the university students arrived, piling their stuff into their living spaces and their young selves out onto streets. About 35 students learned that first weekend that drinking on a Chapel Hill street or while underage piles up misdemeanors on their records

This week, people piled up around schools all over the place. The line forms on the bypass outside of St. Thomas More School around 2:40, with cars backed up to the overpass before the bell rings, letting the children loose.

In the afternoons around the high schools they are piling out — out of the buildings, into the parking lots and onto the streets in cars filled with kids ready to burst at the seams from holding everything in all day.

Along Smith Level Road, the kids are piling onto the rural road to walk home from Carrboro High School on a sidewalk that doesn’t go far; they complete the trip home on steep grassy areas along the roadside.

Wherever you go any time of day, there are more people and cars. Even in the neighborhoods, the children seem to have popped out of nowhere. Where were they all summer? The teenagers messing around on a motor scooter across the street right now — where have they been? They didn’t sleep the whole darn summer away did they?

As the daily patterns change, so does the light. We can see that slant of the sun in the sky by day, and lack of sun when we rise. We know that evenings will now hold more meetings, more work, more of the stuff that fuels and feeds the growth of our communities and ourselves.

But where’s the energy and drive for adults that returned to our kids when this seasonal change brought new books, pencils and faces?

Maybe we simply need the season to change in a way that means we can wear a black shirt outside without melting; that we can stop searching radar maps for an isolated downpour over our house and garden; that our Southern slice no longer looks parched and singed.

There’s a psychological season found with the beginning of school, when fear grips many a belly with the anxiety of everything that’s new — the schedule, the teachers, the school building — it’s there for parents as well as children. But for the adults, we also feel some other tug, a whisper really, of “Labor Day, Labor Day, Labor Day,” because we know, whatever the calendar says about fall beginning on Sept. 23, just like we know summer didn’t (psychologically) begin June 22, fall begins after Labor Day.

So, we’ll pile on a few more days of denial, enjoy the three-day weekend ahead, then full-speed ahead, back to the routine that helps us efficiently toil until new life rips us from its numbing effect with spring — and we hear the new whisper: “Memorial Day, Memorial Day, Memorial Day.”

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