The highlight of my second grade year came very early. Fairfield, Ohio held an annual Indian Summer Days festival in September. It was your standard "Hooray for our town!" sort of event that seemed to celebrate civic pride and the return of children to school in equal measure. As a local businessman, my father was able to have one of his lawn care trucks in the parade to kick off the festival. I got to ride along and throw candy to all the kids my age that were lining the streets. Heady, sugar coated times. It was about a thousand degrees on the day of the parade, which melted some of the candy, but probably helped the beer sales. A co-worker told me on Friday that he wasn't particularly enjoying the "indian summer" we were having. It's been wretchedly hot for September. Half of the days this month have topped out over 90 and we're 12 inches behind on rain. The warm temperatures outside are still great for planting, though a
lot of the plant materials at the garden store I frequent are looking a
little worse for the wear after all the heat they've been exposed to. I
managed to get some planting done - nothing too exciting - and that's
good, because as it was I was cooked when I got finished.
Current weather notwithstanding, this same co-worker also reminded me that Autumn officially began this weekend - which made me just curious enough to look up the phrase "indian summer" and discovered that you can't really call it an indian summer unless you've had a hard frost already - and that it's usually in late autumn, This is just summer. Or it was until about 12 hours ago. So I've been wrong all along. I thought "indian summer" meant you were back in school and uncomfortably warm. Turns out it's more like the nice weather that lets you play backyard football some years at Thanksgiving.
The good folks in Fairfield have taken to calling it the "September Days" festival - though I imagine they're more concerned about the use of the word " indian" as they were the fact that it can't be an indian summer when summer hasn't ended.