We’ve spent our whole adult lives of drudgery to believe fall to be an end — the end of life promised in the spring and a reminder of all the unfulfilled promises we made ourselves regarding summertime fun and projects.

Here we are my friend, the roof still needs to be done, the porch isn’t painted and I don’t think the canoe saw a single pond or lake this year. Pathetic, right? The death of another year with still so much on the to-do list.

It wasn’t always that way though. Sure, the summers were ours in our younger days but the rebirth — the beginning of the year came in the fall.

While summer offered the promise of solitary fun or outings with small groups of friends, it was the cacophony in the hallways, ringing of the bells and and the structured chaos of the beginning of the school year that always felt like the start of the new year.

The smells alone — reams of new paper, fresh jeans, newly filled pencil boxes. Even that funky smell of the very first Erasermate erasable pen ink! It only took a couple misplaced punctuation marks however, to realize the only thing erasable about that ink was the cinderblock eraser at the end that effectively carved the paper one layer beyond the mistake.

Armed with my new school clothes from Poor Simon’s, a fresh Trapper Keeper and a healthy sense of dread that I had completely bungled both of those choices, I strolled off for the first day of school with the exodus of others pouring out of Navy housing toward Coffin School or the junior high.

At the junior high, cliques regrouped in a strangely organic way. Eighth graders stood in the lobby, selling passes to ride the elevator to the third floor to wide-eyed sixth graders. Most wouldn’t bite however there was always a couple kids that didn’t realize that neither passes nor third floor space existed in the school.

Emerging cliques that would define the rest of our school careers. Where we were once a conglomerate of unkempt kids stuffed into clothes our parents laid out for us, now standards of actual style were flooding the hallway.

There were the kids wearing Izod shirts with popped collars, kids with Levis and tee shirts, kids who never took off their jean jackets — and then any kid who’s family could afford them wore L.L. Bean boots. In a self-destructive twist on the trend however, it was a faux pas to ever tie said footwear, sending kids careening down the stairwells at every change in classes while other students with loose-fitting Bean boots gallumped and clomped by their twisted bodies indifferently.

Sure, we had worries. We worried the girls we liked wouldn’t like us. We worried twice as much if they did like us. We worried our clothes, hair and updated slang were all wrong. We worried about changing voices, acne, awkwardness, social ineptitude.

Academically, there was the time I wrote a haiku in language arts class. The teacher called me out in front of the class for what she was certain was plagiarism.

“I don’t know where you copied this from, but I’ll find out,” she announced to the class to my mortification.

I should have taken it as a compliment in retrospect, but my young self esteem had been attacked and I never wrote poetry again.

Then there was the time we were supposed to find a spooky book to read around Halloween time. I chose The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury. After a couple days of poking around the pages, I found myself bored and asked if I could choose a new book.

“Yes,” my teacher replied with a sigh, “I thought that might be a tough one for you.”

Now, I didn’t really keep up with my school records but I do remember coming into junior high reading and writing on a college level — it was in an official report and everything. By now, I had begun questioning everything.

The final blow came when a teacher asked if I might have test anxiety. Well, if I hadn’t had it by then, I certainly did now! I spent an hour, one day a week after that for about two months in a nondescript room being told I didn’t need to stress over taking tests. When it was finally over, I came out of the experience a nervous wreck but I paid more attention to my tests.

There was seriously a time when I went from confidently reading Romeo and Juliet to being afraid I was going to get pulled from class and marched down to the special ed classroom.

Somewhere in the middle of teachers stripping away my confidence and the onset of body hair, life went on at Brunswick Junior High, but even most memories of work there center around a social situation.

There was the time Bert spilled an entire bucket of starfish in formaldehyde across the floor, including my new sneakers. The smell, combined with the traumatic mush of deceased Asteroidea upon impact with the tile floor was almost too much for a stomach full of breaded veal patty from lunch. I managed to hold it down lest Nicole across the room saw what a wimp I was and stopped asking me for Bubblicious.

Then there was the time a few of us thought we were going to create our own gym elective, taking up handball in the little room off the gym.

After a solid week of tenderizing the palms of our hands against a little ball moving at the speed of sound around an enclosed space, we’d had enough. We emerged that final Friday with hickey-like hematoma all over our bodies from our not-yet-developed hand-eye coordination.

Through the highs and lows, life began after Labor Day. Summers were the break between all the things we did that held our young lives together — friends, feuds, romance and somehow — an education.

Douglas McIntire is a former resident of Brunswick.