Summer's Eve
Photograph by Johannes Plenio
When I was a kid growing up in Staten Island, New York, I lived in a house across the street from a wooded area neighbors simply called “The Fields”. For us kids, it was a place of wonder, mystery, and adventure. If you went far enough in, there was an old graveyard, a truck yard, and plenty of snakes and insects. Most of the time we would venture inside, it was on a dare, each of us daring each other to go further in. Sometimes we’d go so far, the trees were so thick, and you could barely see anything, not even the sun. There were a couple of bad kids a few houses away from us, who would occasionally set it ablaze. Those boys were always up to no good, but for some reason, I liked them.
When Summer’s Over by Lasswell, Thumbnail image by Mohamed Nash
My parents wouldn’t let me get that far out of sight, until I was in my teens, so as a little boy of eight years old, I would stay to the outskirts, where my parents could keep an eye on me. I had a friend named Johnny, and one summer’s end, we discovered someone had dumped an old couch, right there at the edge of The Fields. His family was about to move to Virginia (which is where I think they were from to begin with) before school started up, and we wanted to spend as much time with each other as possible. We would play all day long, but when the sun set, we would head over to that old couch. He would lay on that couch with his head in my lap, and we would just watch the sun slowly descend behind the trees, and talk (what we talked about I don’t remember). You could hear the boats coming into dock, just down the way, or the freight trains, or sometimes my dad’s jazz music playing. Once the crickets began to chirp, we knew it was time to go inside, no need for our parents to call us in for dinner. It’s a bittersweet memory, Johnny moving away, and summer ending. It’s how most people feel, I guess, when the end of summer approaches. Back to work, back to school, back to the humdrum of existence.
Depending on where you live, we’ll all be setting up for hibernation mode soon. Shopping for winter gear, schools supplies, shovels, and snow tires. Me, I’ll be doing the same, but I’ll also be working hard at making this magazine the juggernaut it’s destined to be. It may not look like much now, but that will all change in the very near future. This winter, while you curl up on your sofa with your tablet, hot cocoa at hand, we want to be there with you. Keeping you warm, with the best audio and visual content on the internet. In the meantime, enjoy these last few summer sunsets, spend it with someone you care about. Don’t mourn the end of summer, rejoice in the knowledge there are more summers to come.
