As summer whizzes by, I always wonder why it is that I dread the end of August. If you ask me what my favorite season is, I’ll say autumn, without any hesitation. The crisp air, the corduroys, the crackling orange leaves: It hardly makes sense to dread your favorite time of year.

I think what I really dread is the end of the freedom that summer affords my family: late nights watching family movies, and rolling into camp at 9 a.m. — without the morning rush — to make it there before the first period bell. The fact that at 6 p.m., you can take your gang outside and shoot hoops, toss a ball, ride a bike, or build a sandcastle, without once worrying whether homework is going to get done, or whether it’s going to get dark before your game is over.

My friends with older children who are away at camp, bicycling through Europe, interning nearby, or volunteering in Third World countries are reveling in the lighter load that summer offers. They’re reading books and traveling and realizing that maybe being empty nesters won’t be so bad after all.

I love how each weekend holds new possibilities. Last week I decided I wanted to take my boys white water rafting. On Saturday we did just that, on the Lehigh River in Jim Thorpe, Pa. I can still hear my boys’ nervous whooping as we tossed down our first rapid. Such spontaneity seems inherent only to summer.

This impulsiveness isn’t the only change of the season. Somehow, during July and August, a hot dog seems like an adequate dinner for my children. In January, if I were serving my children hot dogs — which I wouldn’t — the meal would seem woefully inadequate. I would add baked beans, and broccoli, and maybe some elbow macaroni. On a hot summer night, I don’t know why, but a hot dog seems perfectly fine. As long as there is some ice cream and fresh peaches to round out the meal.

Summer is also filled with weekends spent visiting other families at their beachy destinations — the Hamptons, Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Maine. These weekends provide a win-win situation for the visitors as well as the homeowners, who seem to love nothing more than entertaining in their private paradises.

“During June, we love to spend time together as a family,” a father of three who has a house in Amagansett, N.Y., said “But come July and August, we’d go nuts if we didn’t have weekend visitors — especially the kids. There’s nothing like great friends coming out for a few days, having a beer while the barbecue gets hot, going tubing on the Sound, and hanging out on the beach until 9 p.m.”

New Yorkers are highly scheduled folks. Our appointments and dinner plans are made weeks in advance. Ask anyone who has ever lived in other parts of the world: Only in New York do you call friends to make dinner plans, and end up meeting two months later.

Again, not so in the summer. In the late afternoon my cell phone often rings these days, with friends calling to see if my gang is up for a last-minute slice of pizza or an outdoor concert.

In a similar vein, throughout the year we expect our phone calls and e-mails to be promptly returned — except during summer. This is especially true in August, when New Yorkers drop all expectations. Just ask anyone who has ever tried to get a job here at the end of the summer.

“Last summer I began my job search in the middle of July,” a recent college graduate told me. “That was a mistake. There is no point trying to get a job in New York over the summer. No one is in the office on Fridays. And during the last two weeks of August, the city is empty. So you might as well wait until September,” she said.

Let me not forget my favorite part about the summer: the dress code. There are some towns where the Gap would have you covered year-round. But New York is not one of them — except in the summer, when jeans, T-shirts, and flip-flops just about cover it.

Forget the cords and crackling leaves. Maybe summer is really my favorite season.

sarasberman@aol.com