August slipped away like a bottle of wine

But it was never mine, was it?

My birthday is August 14, and marks the beginning of the end of summer for me. It doesn’t help that my mother often slipped back-to-school items in with my birthday presents. I’m still salty about the year I got an alarm clock!

Summer is so short along the Great Lakes that there’s enormous pressure to do all the things and then some before it’s all over.

I was thinking that summer was over and I hadn’t done any real summer things. Then I remembered that I saw a bunch of baseball games, went sailing about once a week, had a long weekend at Lake Erie with my siblings and cousins, spent a great day at a friend’s lake house in Wisconsin, saw the free Corinne Bailey Rae concert at Millennium Park, completed the Chicago Public Library’s summer reading challenge for adults, and somehow managed through a very busy workload.

You can’t do these things except in the summer (well, other than working). You get three months—two and a half, if we’re being realistic—and then it’s back to the ordinariness of it all.

And with that in mind, I put together a Spotify playlist with some great end-of-summer songs, to send the season out.

Finally, here’s a little something for those of you with school-aged children:

What are you going to do to make this summer last? What song should I put on the playlist?