If ever a summer has progressed more quickly than this, I don’t remember it.

It’s August, and how did that happen?

The Skowhegan State Fair starts Thursday — always a sign that summer is waning. Kids are in school-clothes buying mode, the days are getting shorter and Labor Day is a stone’s throw away.

What a year we’ve had, with wild weather events, devastating fires and floods, unprecedented heat and humidity, continued turmoil overseas and a last-minute decision by the U.S. president to bow out of the race.

It seems we reporters are covering more and more vehicle crashes, fires, shootings and deaths. The world is changing, and not always for the better.

We need to catch our collective breath a moment and step off the merry-go-round.

A friend in her upper 80s said to me recently: “Do you realize that in 100 years, nearly all the people on earth today will be dead and a whole new set of folks occupying it?”

This made me think about how everything that seems so pressing and important to us now is merely dust in the wind. Remember that song?

All our possessions, things we can’t live without or aspire to own will, in time, belong to someone else, including our homes, properties, cherished items we inherited from our families that we can’t imagine handing off.

Those who don’t have kids can’t bequeath such possessions to their cats, and young people seem less interested in stuff than we were when we were children.

Remember our grandmother’s cut-glass pitcher, candy dish, silverware and teacups that were passed down to our mothers who cleaned, dusted and guarded them while we kids admired them from behind glass?

They are our possessions now, and who will take them when we go? Who wants them?

I think of the thousands of newspaper stories and columns I have written over 35 years and carefully clipped, organized and stored in airtight containers in our basement.

Twenty years ago I never would have thought about tossing them. Now, I’m thinking I’d better do it before relatives are forced to, should I go first.

My father-in-law, who lived to be 98, purged his house of most of his belongings before he moved out three years before he died, having learned in a church group for seniors that it would save family from having to do it later and agonizing over what to keep and what to throw.

An older couple who were great friends and now are gone, did a similar thing: They gave their family treasures to their kids while they were still able to, keeping only the necessities.

Which is all to say, time is moving on. Those of us in the final third of our lives watch the seasons pass, each year more quickly than the last, and ponder all things worldly.

We evaluate, prioritize, organize, declutter and simplify.

Being with friends and family becomes more important than possessions. Increasingly, experiences such as traveling, reading, listening to good music, partaking of quality food — are more fulfilling than getting and spending.

We still enjoy celebrating birthdays and holidays, but lean toward gifting people consumables rather than collectibles, and prefer receiving the same.

Yes, it’s August, all right. Soon, summer will end, kids will return to school, election frenzy will peak and we’ll be heading into the holidays before a new president is inaugurated.

And time will march on.

Amy Calder has been a Morning Sentinel reporter 35 years. Her columns appear here Saturdays. She is the author of the book, “Comfort is an Old Barn,” a collection of her curated columns, published in 2023 by Islandport Press. She may be reached at acalder@centralmaine.com. For previous Reporting Aside columns, go to centralmaine.com.