By: Jim Taylor

Indian summer


The days are getting shorter, the air cooler, the pace slower. It’s a glorious time of year.

        I love Indian summer – if it’s still acceptable to use that term.

        So many other similar terms have taken on pejorative implications. An “Indian giver” demands the gift back. “Indian time” means “whenever I get around to it.” Indian hemp and Indian tobacco are both poisonous plants. And apparently “Indian devil” is a euphemism for a mountain lion or cougar.

        But I love Indian summer – which my dictionary defines as a period of mild weather that comes before the winter’s cold.

        During Indian summer, the sky can take on a deeper blue almost bordering on purple. The air loses the sultry lassitude of summer; it can be as crisp and bracing as a bite of a fresh-picked Ambrosia apple. But the sun still has power to warm my shoulders through the thin fabric of a T-shirt.

        Turning leaves add splashes of pure color that would delight a Cezanne. Long dusks shade into hushed nights.

        It’s a more leisurely time. The madding crowds have left; the vacationing visitors have gone home. The beaches are once again placid and peaceful; dust can settle on the woodland trails; speedboats no longer slash back and forth across the lake like a tiger lashing its tail.



Sabbath for the soul

 Indian summer feels like a Sabbath in the seasons, the calm when we relax after the frenzied activity of the previous months. Indeed, my dictionary adds a second definition for Indian summer: “A pleasant, tranquil, or flourishing period near the end of something.”

        The Old Testament wisely placed the Sabbath after the six days of work – unlike the Christian Sunday, traditionally marked on the first day of the week.

        In its legendary description of creation, the biblical book of Genesis says, “And on the seventh day, God rested from all the work that had been done.”

        In the Ten Commandments, God instructed Moses, “Remember the Sabbath. Six days shall you labour, but the seventh is holy to your God…”

        That cycle of rest was not restricted to the calendar week. Every seventh year, the land was to lie fallow, to rest, to regain its strength. After seven cycles of seven years came a Jubilee year when debts were abolished, slaves freed, and land returned to its hereditary owners.

        Sabbath thus becomes a principle, as well as a day.

        Even life has a Sabbath. Dr. Robert Katz of the Jewish Institute for Religion, in a book called Towards A Theology Of Aging, described old age as the Sabbath of life. After the hustle and bustle of earning a living, of carving a career, of raising kids and caring for parents, Katz argued, old age can be a time to relax, a time for contemplation and prayer, a time to focus on spiritual growth instead of material growth.

        His description sounds a lot like Indian summer.

Perhaps that why I like it so much.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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