Fryeburg, Maine ? Just now we are floating, quietly, contentedly, on our backs on the river. The current is moving us slowly, so very slowly past the stump on the north side, past the sandy beach on the south.

Mostly we’re not going much of anywhere. In fact we’re not doing much of anything. And we’ve been doing it all day long.

But we’re accomplishing a great deal. We’re watching the clouds curl across the White Mountains. We’re looking at a swirl of black smoke, the result of a lightning strike on the summit of Black Cap the other night.

We’re watching the boys jump off the far bank into the cool water and seeing that their heroics are not impressing the girls one bit. They never have, never will.

They’re wasting their time. We’re wasting our time. It’s the very best part of the season.

All this the splashes in the river, the rituals of a lazy afternoon are the beats of the enduring rhythms of a New England summer. There’s nothing remarkable about it, except for the fact that, along with the salmon and the cod and the open spaces, we’re also in danger of losing summer. In Elizabethan time, Shakespeare recognized that “summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” In our time, the lease is up already.

Our kids are here we think there’s no place they’d rather be, and some of the time we actually believe that but other kids are in school. The students of Tampa went back to school almost three weeks ago, a fact we need to remember the next time our daughters propose some February that maybe we should look into living in Florida. The selfless scholars in Colorado Springs are at the books already. So are the little monsters in the Jefferson School District in Kentucky. This sure is a studious country.

We’re not opposed to the pursuit of knowledge. In our house, the adults voted 2-to-0 that, because the public schools aren’t rigorous enough and the prevailing culture is too coarse, the Shribman girls had to read 10 classics this summer. (The classic “I Know What You Did Last Summer” doesn’t count. Nor does Dad’s favorite, “The Red Sox Reader.”) In our house, the kids voted 2-to-0 that their parents were the meanest parents on the block. The other kids on the block, if polled, would have voted unanimously to support them, no plus or minus 4 percent. Their grandparents are on the kids’ side, as grandparents usually are.

But we all vote, unanimously, that August is just too early to be in school. It’s the best month of the year, especially in these parts. It’s when the days are as warm as apple crisp and the nights as soothing as a peppermint stick frappe at the Scoop Deck in Wells, Maine, which is acknowledged by the experts in our house as the very best ice cream barn in all of civilization. This is when a hike to the Madison Spring Hut, planted on a slab of micaceous schist in small of the back of Mount Madison, has its own special rewards; we’re planning on waking up there this very morning, in the cold of a mountain dawn, and then heading back along the Snyder Brook on a path called the Valley Way.

This is the time when a walk across a mosquito-infested meadow near the Davis Path leads to the dreamy emerald swimming hole in Nancy Brook. (August is the only month when the air and the water are at the perfect temperature for this adventure.) This is the time when it’s actually possible to ride the gentle waves at Reid State Park, in Georgetown, Maine, where the surf and the pines make for a portrait of New England at its most natural, and its most alluring. (In all other months you have to chisel the ice from your ankles).

This is the month when the sweet corn in New England is at its sweetest, when you can see the individual yellow and white kernels in a piece of heaven we call butter and sugar. This is the month when the low-brush blueberries are at their tangiest, and when a mouthful of them absolutely stuffed full of them, to the horror of Miss Manners and of your dentist is New England’s special kind of champagne. Every year you taste these blueberries you say: This was a very good year, maybe not in the market, maybe not at the State Department, but at least on the bushes.

We’re for hard work in school. We believe devoutly in the multiplication table. (Calvin Coolidge, who was from our region, once urged listeners to be as conservative as the multiplication table.) We are committed to the Periodic Table of the Elements. (We sprinkle NaCl on our corn every night.) We bow to no one in our devotion to Charles Dickens (and we pray that one day we will live long enough to see Elizabeth Shribman read “A Tale of Two Cities”). We adhere to the truth that there is nothing quite so beautiful as a well-turned sentence (like this one, from Emerson, writing in 1836 of the New England woods: “Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years”).

But at a time when three-fourths of America’s schoolchildren already are at school, we believe in one thing more. We also believe in August.