I stared at my vanilla soft-serve cone with rainbow sprinkles. It stared back. After a minute or two, there wasn’t a trace of melted ice cream to be found.

With that it was written—summer was ending much too soon.

We were well into what is referred to where I come from as “Indian summer,” or the final weeks of summer;  when the warm weather and seemingly endless sunshine are winding down as fast as kids are returning to school and the leaves are beginning to fall. The smell of that familiar crisp chill is already in the air some mornings.

Why did it seem that the season associated with vacations and adventures, partying, cookouts, and heat always ends sooner than that old foe named winter, the season linked to cold, dark mornings, chattering teeth, and awkward holiday parties? After all, I havent heard of anyone begging a groundhog not to  see its shadow and sentence us to six more weeks of summer.

Well, I’d had enough of this, this…fall…creaping back into the picture. I had to do something to remind myself that there were still a few weeks left of my favorite season and that that big, oafish autumn was encroaching into summer’s territory, slapping its crisp, orange and brown toes onto the wrong weeks. I decided that attending a baseball game would be the perfect solution. Nothing says summer like a juicy Ball Park frank and a seventh-inning stretch.

Without hesitation, I bought a ticket in the nosebleeds for that weekend’s big game.

Hot dog in hand, the first pitch was thrown and it all was off to a good start. An adorable kid of about seven or eight years caught a foul ball right into his baseball cap and the crowd all cheered. After the first inning the home team was winning.

Then, about twenty or so men all dressed alike appeared at one end of the diamond. They carried a large, white tarp and sat it down right at the side formed by the first and second bases. A fluffy white,  cloud was enveloping the baseball mound as the men suddenly ran with an edge in hand to spread the tarp across the sand.

“Cool!” I thought as they unroled it in a fantastic, coordinated fashion. “What a show!” I noticed that the woman next to me wasn’t watching the action below. Instead, she was peering into the sky quizzically.

Then I felt it, subtle at first but then unmistakable. A giant raindrop on my forehead confirmed my fear—it was raining. Within a matter of seconds, it was pouring sheets of rain and there wasn’t even time to descend and take cover in the stadium’s hallways between the seats and the consession stands before becoming completely drenched. The forecast had told of a completely clear evening. Sudden summer storms wern’t exactly the piece of summer that I’d been hoping for.

Three hours and three false alarms later (each met with the same torrential downpour), after spending the majority of it soaked to the bone and freezing to death in my khaki shorts, tank top and sandals, the announcers notified those of us left that the game would indeed be continuing. And I stayed through all nine innings. And my team lost.

 As my wet sandals slapped the concrete on the way home, I decided that while I did enjoy the somewhat fizzled-out high of live sports that day, the more predictable fall weather and the warmer clothes that came with it was a little more welcomed.

By Stefanie Muldrow