The Dog Days of Summer

It's mid-summer, and this time of year usually gets described the same way. The days are long, the air is heavy, and the afternoons don't seem to be in much of a hurry to end. Yes, we are in the dog days of summer.

And I always understood that phrase to mean the stretch of heat we tolerate before fall finally shows up. Kind of the peak of the season. The part of that feels drawn out and a little restless, but this year it’s meant something different to me.

I recently had to say goodbye to a dog I’ve had for fifteen years. He came home as a pup and somehow grew into eighty‑five pounds of muscle, loyalty, and personality. Most dogs don’t typically get fifteen years. By nearly all standards, he had a very long run.

Though, it still felt short. Sitting there with him in those final moments, my mind started flipping through the years as if they were pages in a thin booklet. Different houses, different routines, different sights and smells. Early mornings and late nights. Walks that, at the time, felt just ordinary. I could see it all at once, compressed into something that felt like an instant. Indeed, it was fifteen years that had been reduced to a handful of memories that seemed to overlap each other.

We talk about the dog days of summer as though they drag on. We complain about the heat and count down the days until cooler air arrives. But sitting in that room, I was reminded that even the seasons that feel long while we’re in them don’t actually last very long at all. It was nothing if not a harsh reminder of that.

Time has a way of moving forward while we assume there’s more of it than there really is.

The evenings this week will still be bright. The air will still hang heavy for a little while longer, and life in our little hometown will carry on the way it always does in August. Before long, school will be starting again, and with it new (or even familiar) routines.

But it is moving faster than we tend to believe.

Fifteen years ago feels like yesterday to me right now. I can still picture bringing him home. I can still remember thinking there would be so much time ahead.

There was. And there wasn’t.

Maybe that’s what these late summer days are good for. They remind you that what feels stretched out in the present will one day feel condensed in memory. The routines we barely notice now will eventually be the ones we wish we could step back into for just a minute.

Before the weather shifts and the schedules change again, it’s probably worth paying attention to what’s right in front of us. In the ordinary way that most of life actually happens.

Because even the dog days don’t last forever.