Throughout my childhood and well past college, I bought into the belief that summer begins when school gets out and ends when it comes back.

This pattern (at least in New England) is modeled after peak crop-growing times and roughly correlates with the passage of seasons.

Then I spent three summers in Austin, Texas (or as they call it: years).

By mid-summer of my first year there local news stations openly speculated that we could break the record of 69 days over 100 degrees.

They were right; we ended the summer with 90 days over 100 degrees. The last day to hit that mark was September 30th.

Believe me when I say that September is still very much a summer month.

Of course, you don’t have to believe me. You could just check a calendar which has the autumnal equinox falling on Monday, September 23, 2019.

Nevertheless, people believe they can dictate the seasons based on either their occupations or on how they feel.

They say things like “I’m a teacher so for me, the summer’s over two weeks earlier than everyone else.” That’s fine, but it is an oversimplification equating vacation time with seasons, which aren’t nearly the same.

What about the stay-at-home parent who is taking their first breath since June? Don’t ruin their parade with your pumpkin-spiced rain.

Or they’ll say things like, “Fall’s my favorite season, bring on the scarves and cider!” as if fashion and accessories can dictate the season.

If this were true, we’d have to celebrate the yuletide every time a teenager swapped out their parents’ peppermint schnapps with extract-flavored water. And I know that’s not the case because we only celebrated Christmas once during my sophomore year of high school.

Society enables these premature equinoxicators by gleefully scrubbing summer from our retail shelves. Like most holidays, Labor Day is celebrated through discount prices on name brand mattresses.

But it’s real market power comes from back-to-school shoppers who pick the bones of summer clothing clean during clearance sales strategically aligned to meet with our state’s sales-tax-free week.

But as quickly as our tank tops are pushed aside for notebooks, those get brushed aside for snack-sized candy bars and hollow plastic pumpkin baskets.

Our strip malls are already haunted by Halloween pop up stores sticking their highly flammable hands out from the shallow graves we dug for them last November.

I refuse to be influenced by the petty politics of retail store buyers, which is why I shop almost exclusively on Amazon, where I can buy a $4 Paw Patrol Beach Ball or a $12 Charlie Brown Christmas Tree at any time of year.

My summer doesn’t wrap up for Labor Day, it ramps up.

I like every Facebook picture showing a friend’s kid going back to school. Not because I care about the kid, simply because I know summer is about to get a whole lot less crowded.

The first change is usually evident at the coffee shop when my order is no interrupted by my barista squealing when her pajama-bottoms-clad bestie shows up.

Buying into the notion that Labor Day is the unofficial start to summer is a fool’s errand. Like listening to the boss who says, “we technically don’t have to be here until 9 but that means we should be at our desks ready to go by 8:55.”

Quit acting like an ant when you’re living in a grasshopper world.

Enjoy your unofficial start to fall and back-to-the-grindstone mentality. Next week, I’ll be in the same place I’ve been for the last nine years: enjoying a week-long summer vacation in Cape Cod. It’s so much lovelier once everyone else is gone.

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