Editor’s Note: Summer in Bloomington is over

Labor Day is the traditional marker of summer’s end.

In Bloomington, there’s other ways to tell. One of them is the 4th Street Festival of the Arts and Crafts.

This year Bloomington’s Writers Guild had set up a “Poetry on Demand” booth at the festival. It worked exactly like you’d expect: Give a poet a subject, wander away for 20 minutes or so, and return to collect the result, banged out on a typewriter.

I was set to describe my poetic demand, when a woman I did not recognize walked up. I absolutely did not know her. By way of introduction she said she figured I must be asking for a poem about the hawk and the fish on top of the Monroe County courthouse.

She obviously knew me.

Because that was, of course, exactly what I was asking for. It made my day. Even my week. It might even get me to the end of the year.

Twenty minutes later, Shana Ritter had banged out the requested verse on a typewriter:

The Hawk and the Fish

The courthouse stands in the middle
of the square in the midwest town

at the top of the courthouse
the copper fish created in 1826

and at the top of the fish, when
the weather permits, perches

adoringly, the red-tailed hawk
one from the earth, one from the sky

one shaped by history, the other
by wind, they guard the secret

of what we do not really know.

—Shana Ritter

I have spent a fair amount of time watching hawks perch on the high spots on Bloomington’s downtown skyline. It’s rare that a hawk will actually sit on the courthouse weathervane shaped like a fish. But sometimes it does.

In a few lines, Ritter managed to capture what it is that keeps me looking up to check every time I walk past. It’s one thing made of copper and the other thing made of feathers, which brings the metal thing to life, by sharing some space with it for a while on the courthouse dome.

Down at street level, the 4th Street Festival was taking an ordinary piece of downtown and, for a couple of days, bringing it to a different kind of life.

People wandered among the booths, stopped to talk, bought art, and ate festival food. Every year on Labor Day weekend in Bloomington, 4th Street proves that a road is sometimes more useful when you close it to cars and fill it with people. 

A swing time band played. Young people from the Indiana University dance club came out onto the pavement and cut loose to the music.

Of course, popular music is also a way to mark the changing of the seasons.

For younger readers who ache to know what songs the nostalgia people cue up to mark the end of summer, here’s one view: Jimmy Buffett and John Prine always deliver what is asked, even when it’s someone else covering their famous songs.

Buffett’s “Come Monday” is about the day following a Labor Day weekend. And when Buffet’s line is sung, “Come Monday, it’ll be alright,” I believe it every time. 

And whoever sings Prine’s lyric “Summer’s end came faster than we wanted,” they’re talking about something bigger than a change in the weather. And when they sing “come on home,” how could you not? 

Labor Day weekend, the Fourth Street Festival, a swing time band, dancing in the street, Buffet and Prine playing in my head. At home in Bloomington, on Sunday afternoon, all signs pointed to the same thing.

Summer here is over. 

But this year before it left, Shana Ritter sat down at a typewriter and let the rest of the world know what some of us locals already do: The hawk and the fish on top of the courthouse are guarding a secret.