The End of Summer

These are not the products of photoshop. These are authentic negative contact sheets bent by time and wear. They were recently discovered on top of a bookshelf in my parents’ house where they sat forgotten for years, more than a decade. These were contact prints of images made the summer of 2003 in Boothbay Harbor, Maine for a story that was never published.

It was to be the story of one summer at the seasonal seaside restaurant Chowder House. But now it will become something else, a reflection of my own history laying over top a past experience like the dust and grime laying over the prints themselves.

That summer the young people working at the restaurant were just another crew in a long, multi-generational alumni of crew enjoying a mixture of earning for college and having fun in a Maine tourist village.

But even then something felt inevitable about the end of the place, as if it was just around the corner. Though Chowder House would not officially close its public doors for another fifteen years, its owners, Bob and Sally, were already talking about closing.

Running a seasonal restaurant is a lot like running a summer camp. It is a labor of love more than a business. As Bob was happy to say over beers, there are far easier ways to make money.

But now this story is more than the restaurant and even its end. Because looking at the old prints I realize this was the last summer our family was together. So the title I originally chose for the story–THE END OF SUMMER–takes on a new layer of meaning.

Within eleven months I would be divorced. And now discovering these old prints nearly two decades later it is like looking at an indirect picture of the end of that chapter of our lives together.

So I will share these images as they are but within the context of a long history.

Here is a picture of the last days of a thing. But it is not a sad story because summer, though it ends, comes again. Maybe the truth is that summer never ends even if the seasons of our lives do.

Maybe the end of summer is only the beginning of a new autumn leading to a new winter that will gladly welcome a new spring until summer returns fresh and happy to give us new memories.

ONE summer may end but summer itself never ends.