Dar Williams, "The End of The Summer"

The summer ends, and we wonder where we are,
And there you go my friends with your boxes in your car.
And you both look so young and last night was hard you said,
You packed up every room
and then you cried and went to bed,
But today you closed the door and said
"We have to get a move on,
It's just that time of year when we push ourselves ahead,
we push ourselves ahead."
And it was cloudy in the morning
and it rained as you drove away,
And the same things looked different,
It's the end of the summer, the end of the summer,
When you move to another place.

And I feel like the neighbor's girl who will never be the same,
She walked alone all spring,
she had a boyfriend when the summer came.
He gave her flowers in a lightning storm,
They disappeared at night in green fields of silver corn.
And sometime in July she just forgot that he was leaving,
So when the fields were dying, she held on to his sleeves,
She held on to his sleeves.
And she doesn't want to let go,
Cause she won't know what she's up against,
The classrooms and the smart girls,
It's the end of the summer, the end of the summer,
When you hang your flowers up to dry.

And I had a dream, it blows the autumn through my head,
It felt like the first day of school,
but I was going to the moon instead,
And I walked down the hall
with the notebooks they got for me,
My dad led me through the house,
my mom drank instant coffee,
And I knew that I would crash,
but I didn't want to tell them,
There are just some moments when your family makes sense,
They just make sense.
So I raised up my arms, and my mother put the sweater on,
We walked out on the dark and frozen grass,
the end of summer.
It's the end of summer
When you send your children to the moon.

The summer ends and we wonder who we are,
And there you go my friends with your boxes in your car.
And today I passed the high school, the river, the maple tree,
I passed the farms that made it
through the last days of the century.
And I knew that I was going to learn again,
again, in this less hazy light,
I saw the fields beyond the fields, the fields beyond the fields.
And the colors are much brighter now,
It's like they really want to tell the truth,
We give our testimony to the end of the summer,
It's the end of the summer, you can spin the light to gold.