Round about Labor Day, in these parts, the air turns suddenly cool. Grandkids are suddenly older, boarding school buses for kindergarten or junior high (sic!). The field shrieks with goldenrod, vegetation’s last hurrah before the hideous massacre of frost. We gorge on last corn, last tomatoes, final melons, from local farmers; though all produce is available nowadays from somewhere, for sweetness and texture what’s shipped never rivals what’s picked. Soon we must close the pool (be still, my heart!). Languor gives way to clangor. We are older – oh! – by a decade, not just a day.

This time of year has always made me sad: not morbidly, helplessly, but more cognizant of mortality, nearer tears. Our word “sad” traces an evolution in human consciousness. It emerges from the Latin satis (as in satisfied, sated), denoting sufficiency, gradually gravitating into a sense of seriousness, steadiness, and thence to regret. Science, in its humorless way, makes a mood a diagnosis – SAD: Seasonally Affective Disorder – for which therapies and chemicals are prescribed. (In olden days, “the devil made me do it”; nowadays, our DNA’s to blame.)

While we know, in theory, Nature knows no stops and starts, only continuous transformation, that every birth presages a death and vice versa, and the dormancy of winter is essential to the blossoming of spring, Labor Day feels like a sharp division, a door slammed on who we were. I am older suddenly, closer to… but enough of that, shake it off, eyes forward, up and at ‘em Adam, pull up your socks! Yet one final cool dusk, the pool still warm, let me dawdle in reverie, while, through outdoor speakers, the music played.

Jane is a fair-weather swimmer, so I was alone in the wet warmth, pooch Henry anxiously pacing the pool’s perimeter, as yet an aquaphobe. (Google insists cockapoos love to swim; Henry demurs.) Brahms’ Requiem was playing with its luxuriant regret. (Brahms’ whole profound output may be reckoned a prolonged sigh.) This piece and I go back a ways. It was the music I played returning home from school fifty-five years ago to await shipment, from the Caribbean, of my father’s corpse.

Slowly paddling, while the sun set and cool air prickled my cheeks, my years awed me and the lives I’d known, some by now almost faded to invisibility. I both felt my age and disbelieved it. I remembered deaths – from the first that was real to me, when I was eight, to those underway now – of friends in hospital gowns. (Is any garment less becoming?) My sadness both throbbed and soothed: yes, it hurt saying goodbye but how glad I was to have been here all this time! The difference between humans and other creatures, between me and Henry, pacing, supervising, is our sense of time. It may torment to anticipate our end, comparing what we’ve done with what we dreamed, but it’s thrilling, too, the beauty and suspense of being, perceptible only through a consciousness of time. Only time makes stories of our lives: for Henry there’s no beginning, middle, end, only now. He’s happier than I – no doubts, remorse, dread – but would I trade his uncomplicated ease for this haunting regret? Dogs’ eyes may water but they do not weep. Tears are the children of time.

I am glad to be sad. But how can that be? Aren’t pain and pleasure opposites?

Language here misleads. Anguish is an ingredient of joy and vice versa. Today’s glow derives from yesterday, as nature is vivified by a setting sun. Consolation depends on desolation. Brahms felt this, one is sure, as he composed.