LABOR

The laborious days before Labor Day.

Sorting, shopping, wash-and-drying, packing, prepping; 'tis college drop-off time.

Miles and states to cross. Flights of stairs to climb and descend.

Directives and hugs to share. Advice to be formulated, then swallowed. 

Miles and states to be crossed once again.

Unhappily solo.

The laborious days before Labor Day.

Hurry home from far away cities to High-Schooler-to-Be, Big Bro, and melancholy mutts who miss their sissies, and know their bros are soon-to-be MIA, too.

There are novels to be read, calculators to find, shorts and tees to be matched, red pens to be purchased. (Note to Target's Back-to-School-supplies buyer: order more red pens before Labor Day next year!)

Summer. 

I miss you.

You're Glorious.

Chock-full of poetry. Empty of cares.

Firefly gazing, strawberry picking, barbecue hazing. Planting, pruning, picking, pickling.  

Meandering bike hikes, base-running till dark. Swimming beneath stars, secret-spilling by a fire pit.

Waltzing on drenched grass beneath sudden, sweet-smelling downpours.  

Summer.

I love you.

You bid gentle breezes and buzzing insects to lull us to sleep. You season everything with 'sweet'.

Summer kicks Worry to the curb. Tells Concern to take a hike. Sends Anxiety packing from the party.

Labor Day invites them back.

Thirty plus hours in a car over four short days, and I am no longer thinking about hydrangeas to be watered and cantaloupes that must be picked before frost.  

Driving through a landscape shifting from green to gold, I am listening to heated radio talk of Syria, Climate Change, and Cyrus. Learning horrific details of chemical weapons. Contemplating a teenage conversation about the pitfalls of fame. Considering all the change a new school year will bring: will the kids be safe and happy, get inspiring teachers, meet good friends, join the club, make the team, make me nuts?

It's Labor Day, and I am heavy-laden.

How fitting then, that on this close-to-summer's-end afternoon, a poet should challenge all of us who are tired and troubled; his words releasing fear from our fall.  

At today's requiem mass for poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, Michael Heaney told mourners in Dublin that his father's final words were "in a text message he wrote to my mother just minutes before he passed away, in his beloved Latin and they read: 'Noli timere' – 'don't be afraid.'"

Noli timere. Don't be afraid.

Words to live by each day of every season.

Heaney, a brilliant poet - and extraordinary man - labored all his adult life composing words, thoughts, and phrases that will be read and studied for generations to come. In DIGGING, he reflected on his father and grandfather who worked diligently and expertly, cultivating the earth. Heaney notes that his gift - and labors - would be spent cultivating language that celebrates the earth and its people:   

"....By God, the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man. ....

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog....

...The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it."

Imagine. At the end of a long, distinguished career, just moments before his death, Seamus Heaney wrote five words of comfort and wisdom that may be the most powerful words he would write in his lifetime.

"Noli timere. Don't be afraid."

Words I'll try to to live by each day of every season. 

A poet took his 'pen'. And healed with it.

Au revoir, Summer. Welcome, Fall!

QUING HEREBY DECREES:  I've missed you, dear Reader!  Time, now, to catch up....