They clean the streets here one day every month in the spring, summer, and fall. If you forget and leave your car parked on the wrong side of the road that morning, it's ticketed and towed away. So it's the sort of thing you try not to forget.
I was marking down the street-cleaning days on our calendar just now, filling them in for the rest of the year. By the time I got up to October, I found myself almost scoffing--the possibility that it will ever be October again seems so remote. Summer is just kicking into high gear, and I've only been to the beach once this season. There are so many sunny days and warm evenings and lightning bugs and late-night flip-flopped trips to the ice-creamery ahead that it seems impossible that autumn lies ahead, even distantly.
I find myself thinking this way often. I'll go to buy something, a sweater or a dress, from a catalog, find out it's on back-order for four weeks, and cancel the order. Because I just know that August is never going to happen.
It's similar, I think, to the way many of us react to warnings about global warming or species extinction or other things that we can't see happening right before our eyes. We feel on some level that they are never going to happen. Especially because the wait-time is not weeks or months, but decades or generations.
