'The Summer Has Begun to Pass Away'

 Anton Chekhov wrote nothing in the summer of 1888 but thought about writing a novel. He stayed at the villa of his editor and friend Aleksi Suvorin in Feodosia, in Crimea on the Black Sea. He was leading a “vile, lotus-eating life,” as he says in a letter to his family written July 23-24: 

“The days pass in an endlessly replete stream, the cup of life overflows . . . Lounging about on the beach, Chartreuse, punch, fireworks, bathing, good cheer at supper, trips, songs – all such pleasures make the days go by so quickly that you hardly notice them; time flies while the drowsy head nods off to the sound of the waves and refuses to get down to work.”

 

Despite his inactivity, earlier that year he had written “The Steppe.” Soon he would write “A Dreary Story” and “Gusev.” The novel was never written but Chekhov was on the cusp of his greatest period.

 

Every year as Northerners we are surprised by summer’s passing, as though it were a fluke. We go on sensing within us the cycle of the seasons. Saturday morning here in Houston the temperature dipped to sixty-one degrees, the first time that cool this season. It felt almost chilly but I left my jacket at home. Howard Nemerov published “Summer’s Elegy” in The Blue Swallows (1967):

 

“Day after day, day after still day,

The summer has begun to pass away.

Starlings at twilight fly clustered and call,

And branches bend, and leaves begin to fall.

The meadow and the orchard grass are mown,

And the meadowlark’s house is cut down.

 

“The little lantern bugs have doused their fires,

The swallows sit in rows along the wires.

Berry and grape appear among the flowers

Tangled against the wall in secret bowers,

And cricket now begins to hum the hours

Remaining to the passion’s slow procession

Down from the high place and the golden session

Wherein the sun was sacrificed for us.

A failing light, no longer numinous,

Now frames the long and solemn afternoons

Where butterflies regret their closed cocoons.

We reach the place unripe, and made to know

As with a sudden knowledge that we go

Away forever, all hope of return

Cut off, hearing the crackle of the burn-

ing blade behind us, and the terminal sound

Of apples dropping on the dry ground”

 

That year, 1967, I was almost fifteen and I accompanied my father when he installed the wrought-iron railing and fence he had made for a wealthy family in Bratenahl, a tiny village northeast of Cleveland on Lake Earie. The lady was friendly and served us lunch. She invited me afterwards into the backyard which was almost filled with a small apple orchard. She gave me a burlap sack and said I could fill it with apples. I had picked crabapples before. They were wormy and indigestible, and we used them in apple fights. Picking large, unblemished apples was a novelty and is forever associated with the passing of summer and the arrival of autumn: “the terminal sound / Of apples dropping on the dry ground.”