The Last Long Weekend

Labor Day doesn’t ask permission. It just shows up, flips the calendar, and tells you summer is over.

There’s no official ceremony. Nobody blows a whistle. The sun still hangs around a little while longer, the pool water’s still warm, and if you squint on a Tuesday afternoon in September, you can almost convince yourself nothing has changed. But it has. You know it has. The white pants go back in the closet. The neighborhood pool gets that padlock on the gate. And somewhere in the back of your mind a voice says, well, that was fast.

Wasn’t it always?

Every summer starts the same way. Wide open. Endless. Memorial Day arrives and you’ve got a hundred days stretched out in front of you like an open field with nobody between you and the end zone. Crab feasts. Beach chairs at the water’s edge. That first cold one on the deck when the humidity finally breaks around eight o’clock. Kids in the backyard until the lightning bugs come out and somebody’s mother starts hollering from a screen door.

And then you blink and it’s the first week of September and you’re looking at pictures on your phone from June wondering how they got so old so quickly.

That’s the thing about summers. They don’t announce themselves as important while they’re happening. You don’t know which cookout is going to be the one you talk about at a funeral twenty years from now. You don’t know which afternoon at the beach is the one your daughter is going to describe to her own kids someday. It all just happens. Ordinary Saturdays that turn into something else entirely once enough time gets stacked on top of them.

Those days leave footprints on your soul. Touchstones on the heart. Little echoes that don’t ever really stop echoing.

Some of it becomes legacy. Most of it becomes something quieter than that — proof, simply, that we were here. That we showed up. That we sat in that chair, on that porch, with those people, and it was good. The photo library and the social media posts are just receipts. The real thing lives somewhere the cloud can’t back up.

So yeah, there’s a melancholy to this weekend. There’s supposed to be. Anything worth having is worth missing.

But here’s where I push back on my own sad song.

Because autumn is not a consolation prize. Autumn is not what you settle for after summer leaves the room. Anybody who’s ever walked out of a stadium into a cool October night with a win in their pocket knows better than that.

The leaves are going to turn. The maples down the street are going to do that thing they do every year where for about nine days they look like they’re on fire, and every year you’ll say to somebody, “have you seen the tree on the corner?” And they’ll say yes. And you’ll both stand there a second like a couple of lost souls in time admiring a tree, wondering if its beauty will be indelibly etched upon your brain.

The air changes. It gets clean and sharp and it wakes something up in you. The grills come back out, only now there’s a purpose to it, now the smoke is drifting across a parking lot at ten in the morning while somebody’s tailgate speaker plays too loud and a stranger hands you a plate of something.

Sunday means something again.

That’s what we get on the other side of this weekend. Not a lesser season. A different one. Summer is soft and slow and forgiving. Fall has teeth. Fall keeps score. Fall gives you Friday nights under the lights, and Saturday afternoons, and Sundays where an entire city lives and dies together for three hours and then argues about it until Wednesday. And then we look to the next game and do it all over again.

There will be a game this fall that people in this town remember for the rest of their lives. There always is. Somebody’s kid is going to sit in a stadium for the first time this season and forty years from now that’s going to be one of their touchstones — the noise, the cold seat, their father’s hand on their shoulder, some play they’re not even old enough to understand yet.

Those footprints get left in the fall too.

I hope you enjoyed the long weekend; the grill blazed one more time; the lawn chairs provided comfort during a family gathering that feature trips down memory lane of summers past. I hope the conversations ran late and that you said goodbye to the summer of ‘26, properly, and the way it deserves.

On Tuesday morning, we turn around and face a new direction.

The colors are coming. The cold is coming. The Sundays are coming.

Summer left its footprints. Autumn is about to leave a few of its own.

Are you ready for some football?

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Source: https://russellstreetreport.com/2026/09/07/lombardis-way/summer-is-over/