Can the summer be over? The last performance of the Medora Musical is tonight. I'll be there with the incomparable Sheila Schafer, the Queen Mum of North Dakota, who cheers and claps and barks out a celebratory shriek now and then - to the amusement, often astonishment, of the innocent folks in the rows in front of her, who have never heard so many joyful decibels burst without warning out of so diminutive a woman.

It's fun to watch her in action, miming salutes to the musical's performers, winking at Job Christianson, shaking hands with the parade of old friends and perfect strangers who approach the folding chair throne in row G, often shyly, to tell her how much they appreciate who she is and what she has done and represents. When she lets rip one of her ear-splitting blasts of beatitude, someone nearby invariably turns to give the "perp" a dirty look, but then relaxes into a broad smile and says to the person he's with: "Oh, it's Sheila." She's an octogenarian biologically and, like Theodore Roosevelt, approximately 6 years old in spirit. It's impossible to be around her and not want to live at a higher decibel of joyfulness and gratitude. As C.S. Lewis said of the poet Spenser, "to know her is to grow in mental health."

Meanwhile, on Labor Day, the Burning Hills Amphitheater will host a celebration of Medora's Wade Westin, who died suddenly on Feb. 13 at the age of 34. I had the good fortune to work with Wade a couple of times in the last few years. He represented everything that Harold and Sheila Schafer sought to enshrine in Medora. Everyone who knew Wade admired both his work ethic and his flawless character. The program at 2 p.m. Monday is free, but donations are encouraged for the Wade Westin Memorial Fund, which will benefit his two children, Wyatt and Hannah.

Can the summer really be over? Even in this off year, my tomatoes are starting to roll in in a big way. Every couple of days, with the help of The Triathlete, I pick the patch clean (she eats two cherry tomatoes right off the vine for every one that finds its way into the bucket). But the next time I look out my window at the garden, it's awash again in globular red. My sweet corn is magnificent this year. I love nothing more than venturing into the garden, unceremoniously cracking off a couple of ears and tossing them into a pot of boiling water. Sometimes I take a glass of white wine, strip off my shoes and just sit in the garden, Thoreau or Huck-like, and gaze at the pumpkins, trying to figure out how so much biomass can time-lapse out of a seed the size of a fingernail. I give away superabundant tomatoes with only a small surge of reluctance, but I've discovered (without shame) that I'm a corn miser.

My Topsy Turvys ("tomato anti-gravity units") are approaching their last gasp. They have great sentimental value to me, but I do not really understand or trust them. This summer I've endured 96 percent of all of the mud showers of my life while trying to water the 15 dwarf tomatoes they've managed to produce. Once a week or so, I've tried to give them away to P.T. Barnum's Americans, but all of my friends are savvier than I am and their eyes glaze over the minute I go into Topsy Turvy rave mode. I've been composing a classified ad for the Tribune: "Free Topsy Turvys to good home, plus $2,000!"

It's a paradox. Autumn is far and away my favorite season in North Dakota, but it always aches a little in the way of borrowed time. We can never fully forget that glorious Indian Summer also is the portal to Roosevelt's "season of iron desolation" on the northern Great Plains. Have you noticed how suddenly it started to get dark too soon? Mid-day I think, I'll mow the lawn in the cool of the evening, but a few hours later I find myself racing against the sunset to finish the last swaths. I grieve the loss of light.

I love to wake up cold in crisp, cool sheets - wait it out as long as I can while I build up the nerve to crawl down and dangle over the edge of the bed in search of the fallen blanket. I love the morning air when you first venture out - the subtle but sharp harvest smell of it, the exquisite mauve, goldenrod, rust and ash-green light, the unbelievable clarity of the air, the blue, blue, blue of the sky, the tendril hint of arctic chill, charming because you know it will be 75 degrees by 1 p.m. I love the bustle and optimism of back-to-school time in the heartland, the school supply mania at the box stores. I like the sweet melancholy of watching my neighbors batten up their boats and Jet Skis.

Up to a point, every autumn day is more perfect than the last, more crisp, more exquisite. In spite of a lifetime of sobering experience, for one lovely moment of delusion you let yourself think it will never end. Ah, but it does. One morning you wake up and look out into the gray-black sky, the whip-wind and the snow flurries.

I live up near Horizon Middle School, where back-to-school traffic is fierce. We need a stoplight at the corner of Ash Coulee and Washington. There will be a bad or fatal accident there soon. Twice a day that quarter mile of once-county road feels like downtown traffic in Rome at the full moon - otherwise placid soccer moms darting into the traffic stream like the Earnhardts, SUVs careening in and out of the Horizon loop almost on two wheels, preschool road rage, harried parents taking appalling risks to get to work or - worse - to get Hortense or Poindexter to school on time. So much for the "school's back in session, drive carefully" bumper stickers. Turns out it's not the general public who need to heed the warning.

I've been scouring my garage for jars, lids and canning vats. My mother, who helped me scald and freeze a couple of hundred tomatoes a year ago, has petulantly vacated the state for the duration. In retribution, I am thinking of leaving my emptied Topsy Turvys on her back steps, but not until I have sliced each one of those hard-won tomatoes into watery eighth-inch wafers and fought off the urge to just devour them so that I can pay sacramental homage to the loveliest friendships of my life.

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt Center scholar at Dickinson State University, as well as Distinguished Scholar of the Humanities at Bismarck State College. He can be reached at Jeffysage@;aol.com or through his Web site, Jeffersonhour.org.)