The unofficial end of summer

Labor Day weekend. Everywhere north of here, this is the end: last cookout, pool cover goes on, school clothes laid out. Summer gets a funeral and everybody brings potato salad.

Sarasota doesn't really do that. Our water stays warm into November. The sunsets don't check a calendar. The only way you can tell the season changed is the traffic thins out, the restaurants exhale, and the beach goes back to belonging to the people who never left.

I put an album out this month called "You Can't Frame a Summer," and the title was the thesis: you can't keep a season. You can't save the sandbar afternoon or the drive home with the windows down; they spend themselves in real time, that's the whole deal. A song is the closest I've gotten to cheating that. Three minutes of a June that's otherwise gone.

So this weekend, wherever you are — if it's your last beach day, spend it all the way. Stay past the point where you start thinking about the cooler and the parking meter. Let it end when it ends.

And when it's February somewhere cold and you need three minutes of it back, you know where I keep the summer.