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It’s late summer, which I find to be one of the most melancholy times of year. And it isn’t merely the vestigial fears of school starting up again, or the shortening days and morning mists that make these weeks feel like a sad, slow, plaintive wail of a song. It’s more that, by mid-August, summer — which we greeted two months ago with all-caps excitement (SUMMER!) — becomes just another thing we’ve gotten used to; it becomes the norm, the default state, rather than what it is in early June, when summer is an idea that lights up our collective imaginations.