Once it finally arrives, summer slips away all too soon and all the more quickly with each passing year. The more one tries to prevent its rush towards fall, faster and faster the length of each day shortens. This year’s no exception. With June’s long awaited solstice barely gone by, the fireworks of Independence Day are already a faded memory, another much anticipated seasonal benchmark bid farewell. Bath’s four-day parade of shipbuilding heritage, small town livability and year-round hospitality has once again come and gone. Art in the Park and the library’s book sale have offered up their fleeting aesthetic treasures. Chili and chowder faced off against fried dough and spun sugar. Smokeys Greatest Shows’ cultural equivalent to comfort food plied its warts and all carnival magic, packed up its nomadic amusements and headed off.

For those wanting a steady diet of such municipality transforming crowds, Maine has a full slate of ongoing festivals throughout the summer, capitalizing on everything from Lisbon’s adoration of Moxie to Topsham’s Scottish revelry, from Yarmouth’s bivalve lovefest to Rockland’s ultimate lobster bash. For others, visiting any of those localities is to be avoided if at all possible during those civic challenges to Wiscasset’s summer-long reign as Maine’s most infamous traffic nightmare. Whatever the DOT would have to pay to buy out Red’s Eats would seem a reasonable solution to that forever unsolvable juggernaut. If one truly wishes to slow summer’s passage to a crawl, Wiscasset’s signature bottleneck is the be-careful what-one-wishes-for punchline.

Given summer’s short duration and increased population, I usually opt to forgo what lies Downeast of Bath, ditto Freeport and points south, until after Labor Day’s mass exodus. Brunswick and Bath more than suffice in seasonal urban attractions to tempt me from the primary pleasures of gardening, listening to music while reclining in a deck chair or enjoying the ever changing beauty of the nearby coastline.

Summer is Maine’s season with the most regretted brevity. The other three have their own distinct charms but few wish for them to linger. With so many desiring an endless summer, it seems especially cruel that summers’ longest day is its very first one. That makes inherent astronomical sense, but I still prefer honoring the meteorological designation of June 1, or Memorial Day’s even earlier unofficial recognition of summer’s start, whether or not the weather itself takes any notice. Summer worshipers can then rejoice in warmer temperatures with increasing daylight for at least a little while.

Even during its dog days of excessive heat, summer is savored as the promised payoff for months of shoveling snow and enduring arctic blasts. That summer nevertheless hurries by is the perennial design of a world still subject to the dominance of science reality over the willfulness of human desire. We should all be thankful that mankind wasn’t given actual dominion over the earth, or we’d likely have one season’s sameness all the time. That said, if mankind’s current willfulness continues unchecked, our never enough yearning for year-round warmth may yet become our fateful reality. That reality’s perilous impact on other species, as well as our own, continues to concern far too many not at all.

I’ve always thought the absence of a Maine Shrimp Festival a curious oversight given that local cold water shrimp have always been a mainstay of our unique regional restaurant fare. Trouble is, today that shrimp comes by way of Canadian fisheries. Maine waters have become too warm to sustain our own harvest. Our iconic lobster is predicted to be heading towards a similar fate while clammers continue battling the invasive green crab. Summer in Maine will hardly be the same without its inseparable identity with bountiful seafood. A Maine “Vacationland” without locally caught seafood is unthinkable.

Whatever the future holds, Maine’s summer branding continues its seduction, especially when the sun is shining. For those unable to afford time off during the rest of the year to travel to summer-like weather, summer in Maine is the now or never window of opportunity to bask in the sun’s maximum closeness. Summertime is the time to step away from ongoing worldly concerns and seize the moment, enjoying what is still a priceless environmental gift.

Every year I promise to never again let summer race by. Each passing license plate extolling “Vacationland” sharpens that resolve, especially when so much of in-state traffic begins displaying out-of-state origins. Just as each winter seems interminably long, each day of summer never seems long enough. Those of us blessed in living here full-time well know Maine’s vacation attributes. However, as they say, time is money and being able to spend both together, recreating leisurely and at length, is far more difficult in practice than in theory, especially given Maine’s economy.

That’s the mixed blessing of summer in Maine. Too much of a good thing and not enough hours in the day, or days in the few months remaining, to ever properly appreciate it fully. Some may say that isn’t the way life should be. Maine’s entry sign disagrees, and others might suggest that life itself presents pretty much the same year-round conundrum.

Gary Anderson lives in Bath.