Labor Day Weekend is here, but that would be clear even without a calendar. The end of season has a specific “feel” that you can’t quite explain unless it is upon you.
There are the obvious changes, like the cool breeze that sweeps over the ocean in the mornings. The sand, void mostly of people on weekdays, and the slowly depleting crowds on the weekends. The growing number of empty lifeguard chairs and “no swimming” signs as student lifeguards head back to school. I’d like to include better waves in this list, but that hasn’t really been the case this year.
My orange lifeguard t-shirts, once a bright, deep shade, have become sun-bleached and faded—much like my hair. I suppose I’ll have to take the orange shirt off of my dashboard too.
The sand in my car, sweatshirt pockets, and beach bags probably won’t be fully gone until at least Christmas. Which will probably be around the time I stop hearing whistles in my sleep.
And as September swallows up the summer, we’ll begin to forget about the little things that are part of everyday life in the summer. It’ll slip my mind what piece of equipment belongs to each chair. I won’t have to set an alarm for 8:38 a.m. every night. I won’t see my dingy, rusted, once-blue speaker for months on end. And I’ll forget how long the walk from the container to the beach feels.
It’s going to feel pretty weird to not have to squeeze every appointment, every chore, and every assignment into my singular weekly RDO. Instead, I can now procrastinate doing all of those things seven days a week, just to squeeze them all into one day anyway.
The back-to-school commercials and Labor Day sales feel like the icing on the cake to closing out the summer. But we still have local summer to look forward to – I can almost guarantee there will be at least a few surprise beach days left in the season.
As summer ends, those of us who have been working since May are growing tired of the beach. The days are starting to blend together. But when that cool September morning breeze turns into a 25-degree January wind whipping down the boardwalk, I’m sure we’ll conveniently forget how badly we wanted the season to end. And we’ll start wishing for more days in the sun spent on the lifeguard chair.
Editor’s Note: While Labor Day is Monday, September 7, our lifeguards, in limited capacity, will be on duty through Sunday, September 13! So one more week with our incredible water heroes, and lucky for us, one more column this season from our resident lifeguard, Kailey Aiken, next week!
