A late summer night is filled with potential.

Even as a child you can feel it.

There’s still time left in the summer. Time to go on adventures, to do all the things you swore you’d do at the beginning of the summer. There will still be sleepovers and parties in the park. There’s still time to make memories and find love. But also, on a late summer night it’s almost fall. When fall comes there will be a new school year and a fresh start and a new chance to find love. A late summer night is both full of both potential and endings.

The best of the late summer nights are those with storms. Sometimes the storms appear loudly and suddenly and are over just as quickly. Sometimes, they take all day or even all week to build. Every day the air gets heavier and heavier and you don’t really want the storm, but also, the tension starts to make you feel antsy and you start to think that maybe if the storm finally broke you could get some relief.

I have always liked to sit on the porch before a storm. The summer evenings of my childhood had more lightening bugs and fewer cicadas. Which I guess feels like it’s true of the past in general these days. There used to be more light and less noise. I still like to sit and wait though. A few weeks ago when I sat outside, waiting for the storm, I had a memory of my father.

I was eight, or maybe nine. I was sitting on the front stoop wishing I had something to do, wishing at least that the ice cream truck would come by. Suddenly, I saw my father running down the street. Behind him was a storm. We were not expecting a storm and suddenly, dark storm clouds were chasing my father down the street. He was running and laughing and when he got to the stoop he grabbed my hand and we ran inside and slammed the door, as though the storm could follow us inside. The clouds rolled past our house. We watched the lightening from the living room window.

My father must have been about 36 at the time. So much younger than I am now.

When his dementia started to take hold of him, my father said to me, “I am winding down.” For a long time it was hard for me to reconcile the father of my childhood, a young man who outraced a storm, with my father now, a man who could feel the storm approaching and sat still.

But also I wonder if time is simply a summer evening. Full of both endings and potential and sometimes we outrun the storm, sometimes we watch it from our porch, and sometimes we sit and let it wash over us.