It is hard to believe, let alone accept, that the days of August are running out like so much beach sand through an hourglass stem, and that now it is time again for students to think about going back to school and for me to think about snow tires and months of driving with the headlights on at any hour of the day or night. Not to mention slipping and falling on the ice.

Why every year this should be so hard for me to believe I do not know. I calculate that the entire month of August takes about the same amount of time to elapse as a single Sunday afternoon in February.

My friend Lorie always felt the same way I did about the light in August. As William Faulkner knew, its slant is different. It presages the end of something. Oh, we love August, the early apples, the burgeoning annual flowers in the garden, even the goldenrod, but we know the easy, carefree days of summer are numbered.

Not that there are ever that many. I mean, we don’t live in Florida or California.

The back-to-school season daunts me. Even now, the cedar smell of sharpened Ticonderoga pencils–which, by the way, are made in China, and were never made in Ti, although their graphite “lead” used to be mined there–and the peculiar fragrance enhancement a lunchbox lends an apple or a peanut butter sandwich imbue me with anxiety that even a new outfit does nothing to assuage.

If we count Mr. and Mrs. Twiney’s Apple Orchard Nursery School–and we might as well, since I remember episodes pertaining to it–as well as graduate school, I have spent about 20 years in class. This is why I react so badly when someone I know says something like “My daughter got her bachelor’s degree, and for what? For all the good it’s done her.”

“It’s not all about earning money!” I argue. “Education is a huge gift, for your whole life, even if you never make a lot of money.”

What I don’t say is, even without the recreational drugs–an optional part of the university experience–learning makes your mind an ever-expanding playground where you can have fun with ideas, both whimsical and practical. There are other ways to acquire knowledge, of course, but some of them–the School of Hard Knocks, for example–just take too much out of a person. University is more encouraging, more expansive.

And yet.

It rankles. For students and college graduates I know, student loan debt is serious, sometimes crushing.

The new school year–every new school year–inspires its own resolutions, hopes and fears, but I don’t have to tell you that this coming school year is particularly fraught. Coronavirus Disease 2019 kept many students home last fall. This year, back to school has special meaning. Parents, and even children who once rejoiced in serendipitous snow days, wanted school to be back in session. They missed it.

Now the ugly reality of what is known as the Delta mutation is spoiling the pleasure and excitement of returning to the classroom. Not only is this mutation much more contagious than COVID-19, it is apparently far more likely to infect the young. Fully vaccinated people who had happily put aside their masks are resignedly putting them back on when they go into stores and other public spaces.

Nor do you need to be told that the COVID vaccine, and in fact all things COVID-related, have become politicized. A woman I know put it well: We don’t need to fight and be hateful toward one another, regardless of our political views. I agree, but I find it all very difficult.

We adults are lucky we’re not required to learn as much between now and June as a first-grader, or a kindergartener, or even a preschooler will. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could?

Have a good week.

(Martha Allen lives in Keene Valley. She has been writing for the News for more than 20 years.)