So here I am, back home on the East Coast where I love to be (especially during the summers, those Arizona winters are pretty tough to give up, I’ll tell you that!).

I’ve always felt there’s something precious, almost sacred, about the months of July and August in New England. The trees all full and getting lazy, the annuals people plant in their gardens all out in a million different colors, and the days turning from June’s bright, dry weather to increasing days of the muggies, with the sound of air conditioners humming, sticking doors, tomatoes ripening and gladiolus flowering in the gardens, heat lightning, mosquitoes, the ominous grumble of distant thunder, and hazy mornings with car windows all fogged from the damp night air.

It’s precious up here because you know it’s not going to last. The days have already begun to shorten (although not noticeably yet), but September and back-to-school sales and the start of another school year is just around around the corner. Between the long winters and the start of school, you learn early on to not take the months of July and August for granted.

For me, this time of year gets me all melancholy an sentimental. The memories of carefree summer days playing baseball at the school yard across the street, family trips up to the ocean at Gloucester or Salisbury Beach, vacation weeks at the cabin in Lake Ossipee, or cookouts in the backyard with the Red Sox on the transistor radio are all just that now – memories. And maybe time has done it’s usual fine job of filtering out any unpleasant memories of those days so you can be sentimental about them. But it is what it is; they are fondly held memories nonetheless.

As I grew older, I liked the months of July and August for taking drives to the New Hampshire seacoast or to Newport to hang around the waterfront and the mansions there, or walks around whatever neighborhood I was living in by myself, as if by having those experiences all to myself they could somehow, as Gatsby himself also wished, be bottled to be experienced in one’s own idea of heaven forever.

In Arizona, there really is nothing precious about these months – after all, the heat has already been settled in for a few months, and will still be around until early October. But even then, it’s not as if the weather begins to go downhill like it does up here in the Northern climes – in fact, that’s when the weather becomes why people live or snowbird in Arizona to begin with. In Arizona, the months of July and August are to be survived and endured, not cherished!

I’m not really sure what I’m trying to say here, except that July and August in New England brings about a longing and aching in my heart and soul from memories of days long past when times were different, things were not quite so complicated, and the world was a different kind of place. I’m a dinosaur, I guess, and I don’t really consider that a bad thing.

It’s during this time of year, when I still lived here, that I used to enjoy playing the compliation of Scott Joplin rags I used to have on LP. Their playful, peaceful, and melancholy – at times even sad – spirit recalled the same kind of feelings about simpler times I’m talking about here.

Joplin’s “Weeping Willow” is one of my favorites for that very reason – next to “Solace” it’s my favorite of his rags. This is a nice version.