School is back in session and Labor Day approaches, as headlines announce what we nervous cases see as the apocalypse. Summer is too long for me, emotionally. The bright promise of early summer fades and darkens by mid-August.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the desolate people of the Hebrew Bible cried out to the prophet Jeremiah, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved,” and I could have written this yesterday. Those brave people, crying out their hopelessness, looking for direction and consolation. Me? Footage of the National Guard often sends me to my room with Mexican food, the latest issue of People magazine and my emotional support cat.

I too was hoping we’d have been saved by now, by a fiery yet pleasant orator who could lead this nation back to compassion, to being a Union again, but nope. Negatory. Lots of heroic people but no Gregory Peck or Sigourney Weaver.

This has been quite disappointing.

Early summer had arrived with high hopes, the first weeks of June when the air felt like a gentle warm stroke that said, “This is an ideal climate that I’m giving you right now, so rest into it and dig it.” Everything was in bloom, the gardens and the bushes filled with flowers, millions of people turning out for the peaceful rallies — and I could go for walks in the redwood groves without turning into clammy grandma pudding. Middle summer was still doable, my husband’s roses still blooming.

Our hills in Northern California grew tawny, always reminding me of giant sleeping lions. An occasional coyote ambled along the back roads. Coyotes are ever-vigilant. As I drive by, they look up. I hail them in my heart.

But August, ugh, stifling untenable days, hot tin roof heat. You step outside for a short walk in the sun and return as damp and flat as a moist towelette. Our MAGA friends got the electric thrill of an escalation of right-wing extremism, of Project 2025, while the rest of us got “1984.” The world grew murky under the pitiless sun.

It is hard to move through the dark. You have to go slowly and, probably, horribly, rely on others. This is what I told friends who felt terrorized by what was happening — we go slowly, stick together, and do what Mother Teresa said — instead of great things, of which we are incapable, small acts of great love.

Twenty-seven years ago when my son, Sam, was 9, we moved into a bigger house at the very end of summer, back in the good old days when school began the day after Labor Day. He was afraid to sleep in his new room, which was some distance from mine.

I let Sam sleep on my bedroom floor for a few nights, and then it was time. There was a long hall outside my room, then the living room and then a short hall leading to his room.

The first night, he moved his sleeping bag 10 feet away from my bed, where I sat reading with a book light clipped to my novel. After a moment, the banter began in the dark.

“Doing OK down here, Mom.”

“OK, honey.”

A minute or so later, “Feeling pretty confident tonight.”

“Good boy. Now close your eyes and drift off.”

Night after night, he scooched his sleeping bag farther and farther away, toward independence, each night calling out his progress.

“Got my head and some of my body in the living room, Mom.”

“Well done.”

A moment’s silence. “Kind of OK out here.”

“Great.”

“Maybe a little worried.”

“I know, honey.”

“And sad.”

Something mysterious inside me let him be worried and sad that night. The night after, however, six feet farther from me, he called, “Mommy, I need you for a sec,” and I went out to sit with him.

A week later he shouted from his bedroom, “I’m in my bed.” I shouted back as loudly as I could, “Good job, darling; proud of you.”

Silence. Then, “Want to come see me?” And of course I did, my brave boy now well off the floor.

That is how we’re going to get through these dark, dark days, bravely scooching along, calling to one another.

Labor Day announces a new season: first of all Labor Day itself, parades and celebrations of working men and women, and this year nationwide rallies, millions of us standing up for the dignity of workers and protesting their exploitation. They are the main reason this country works at all. Maybe Labor Day will be canceled next year because attention to the obscene wage gap is sort of a buzzkill. But this year we get to honor and celebrate what makes America great.

Goodbye, cruel heat; goodbye, horrible bugs; go back to school, all you young people in your stretchy micro gym shorts. Not long after Labor Day we can get out our cutest sweaters again, reason to live. And best of all, the poison oak is dying. I can walk my dog on the trails without catching it from the oils she gets in her fur.

Yes, I’m often worried and sad, but then cheered by the goodness that remains — Doctors Without Borders, Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams, the International Rescue Committee and my governor, Gavin Newsom, and his gently weaponized sense of humor.

My friend’s sister was literally dying in January but just bought a beagle puppy. One of my heroes, Rebecca Solnit, said, “To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly.” Nothing is more true. That beagle puppy is Exhibit A.

There will be more dark and stormy nights, figuratively and literally, but the green hills always come back when the rain comes down. The roots of the 200-foot redwood trees in the grove down the street are shallow and thus need to intertwine with each other to withstand the storms and the wind. I see this as excellent advice: Stand tall and connected.

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Anne Lamott, an author of fiction and nonfiction, lives in Marin County, Calif. Her latest book is “Somehow: Thoughts on Love.” X:@annelamott

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