Get opinion pieces, letters and editorials sent directly to your inbox weekly!

The weather was superb — no, perfect — when I took a walk last week. It was 74 degrees, and the sun was as sweet as a warm bath. A few lazy clouds drifted by overhead. Breezes tickled the little sunflowers and black-eyed Susans along my path.

When summer begins to yawn, it’s the best time of the year.

Ripening tomatoes, zucchini, beans and cucumbers overflow in our gardens. Robust corn stalks stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the fields. Farmers’ wagons, overflowing with corn plucked from the fields just hours before, offer their bounty. Colorado peaches have arrived, too, and apples soon will be ready to pick at Apple Acres.

I always get sad and wistful when September arrives. Sure, the sun has been slowly, silently sliding south since late June, but I’ve barely noticed. It hangs high in the sky all summer long, blessing us with long days for swimming, fishing, picnics, reunions, car shows, rodeos and small-town festivals. Even now, two months after that solstice, we can still walk the dog, play baseball and pedal our bikes long after dinner.

Alas, all that is coming to an end. I resist like the worn-out preschooler who protests bedtime.

When I moved to Kearney in 2012, new friends said fall was their favorite season. I didn’t understand. Back home in Cleveland, summer was the most glorious time of year. Temperatures rarely nudged 90, and 75 (“pleasant,” forecasters said) was not uncommon. Every few days, refreshing rains drenched gardens. We swam in Lake Erie and had picnics in parks green with forests, bridle paths, wide meadows and bubbling creeks winding through the woods.

When Kearney friends defined summer as “too hot,” I scratched my head until I finally remembered my family’s travels by car across the Great Plains in the early 1960s. In Pratt, Kansas, a thermometer said 101 degrees at noon under clear, cloudless skies.

Back then, cars lacked air-conditioning, so we rolled down all the windows and put up with those vicious gales of hot air that had our hair whipping around like tall grass. Anything to stay cool.

Now that I live in the Great Plains, I sympathize with your preference for fall — but not so fast.

Summer has zipped by faster than a furious firefly. Summer is travel, swimming, kayaking, fishing, boating, horseback riding and camping. It’s long visits with grandparents and summer jobs for teenagers, but sometimes I think I am the only one in the modern world who cherishes it.

Learning of a different kind thrives in the summer, but since it’s outside the classroom, it’s dismissed. Stern authorities order us to stamp out the fun and put our proverbial noses back on the grindstone like bloodhounds.

It’s still two weeks before autumn officially takes the stage, but Kearney schools and the University of Nebraska at Kearney resumed classes several weeks ago. The football season has kicked off, too. Swimming pools slashed their hours because the lifeguards have gone back to school. We’re strangely impatient to delete much from the most glorious time of the year.

The school year here ends in mid-May when nights are still frosty, and then it resumes when it’s too hot to play football or park ourselves for hours inside an un-air-conditioned classroom. That’s like going to bed at 8 p.m. and getting up at 4 a.m. Those are monastery hours.

I will always miss autumn back home. It’s an explosion of reds, scarlets, oranges, golds and yellows in the forests, and hayrides and fruit farms groan with apples and pumpkins.

Here in Nebraska, I’ve learned that autumn is about the harvest, so I’ve embraced that. I’ve ridden in a combine. I’ve watched the grain trucks lumber down the highway to the grain elevator. I’ve listened to bugling elk at Rocky Mountain National Park and explored dusty treasures at the Junk Jaunt in late September.

As I paddle serenely down these late summer days, I believe that summer will last forever, but if I look behind me, I see fall’s little fingers gripping that kayak, trying to climb in. Soon, they will get in. They always do.

Get opinion pieces, letters and editorials sent directly to your inbox weekly!

Nebraska school officials wrong to attack the press freedoms of student journalists over LGBTQ content

Buy-back programs are political theater that fail to deter crime and suicides while costing taxpayers money

So now we know: Pandemic-related restrictions were devastating to the project of educating our kids. The Education Department dropped the news recently that America’s experiment with remote learning has reduced young children’s standardized test scores to levels not seen in two decades. Though performance fell in every demographic group, the losses were greatest among minorities and the poor.

We had no backpacks, earbuds, cell phones, Instagram, Twitter or Spotify. None of that had been invented yet.

China’s treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang -- including mass extrajudicial detentions, family separations and forced labor -- is by now well documented, despite the secrecy surrounding it.

When Fox News canceled Sarah Palin’s contributor contract in 2013, I wrote that it was “the end of an era.”

In 2021, just 10.3 percent of American workers were members of unions, less than half the proportion we had four decades prior. This collapse in union membership didn’t happen in Canada -- it occurred in the United States for reasons specific to this country, including unpleasant changes in labor law and the practices of corporations that have taken place here over the last 40 years.

Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device.