And a hush falls

I know I've been kind of quite on the ol' blog lately. School started this week and suddenly it feels like everything has gone into fast motion. I've also got a video project I'm working on and that is taking up every spare minute of my time. Not to mention that the hay-fever ball has dropped and so I'm in kind of a fog between the medicine and allergy. My allergies have gotten less severe over the past couple of years, but this time of the year still kind of knocks me for a loop. At any rate, many things have played together to divert my efforts to post.

School started on Monday and that has made everything feel very different too, even after only two days. I guess I had thought that we would just get into it and things would sort of pick up where they left off at the end of May. But it all feels very different. More significant somehow, this time.

The kids all woke up on their own on Monday and were long ready before I was even out of the shower. One of the big differences this year is that half of last year's carpool is at the high school now, and that's with in walking distance, so they probably won't be riding with me much, if at all. In the morning now Kitten just kisses me as she's headed out the door. I didn't realize how much that little 15 minute ride in the morning could mean. We had a chance to laugh and talk some and be a little group together. With licenses just a year or two away, that 15 minutes is now just a favorite memory.

Kitten also tried out for the fall high school play, which is a musical this year. They're doing "Big River", a musical based on Twain's "Adventures of Huck Finn". And being a theater person, I know what that means---if she makes it, she'll be living on the stage after school more than she's at home.

I stood in her door on Sunday evening after I had kissed her goodnight and shut off the light. I just stood there looking at her. I couldn't shut the door. I just stood there looking at her in the light that was coming in from the hall and falling across her bed. She had the covers pulled up to her chin and was cuddled down ready to give in to sleep, until she noticed that I wasn't leaving and asked what was wrong.

I told her that I didn't want to close the door because it felt like once I did everything would change. It felt like I was at the crest of the first hill on a roller coaster, and that as soon as I clicked the latch and turned to go upstairs that we would move into this uncontrolled free fall. I could picture myself, with alarming vividness, opening the door on the next morning three years from now and seeing her bags packed there on the floor of her room. I'd take them up and put them into the car taking her to college or Japan or wherever she is bound. It felt like closing that door would close a chapter of my life that has been everything I hoped it would be, and that I didn't want to end.

But of course I did close the door. Can't fight the tide, just have to ride the wave.

That's just me, I guess. I always get a little reflective in the Fall. Autumn is a strange season of beginnings and endings. With school starting it has always felt more like New Years than Jan 1. School beginning, classes starting, activities getting back into full swing after a summer break, sometimes new friends and opportunities---and all that newness gets oddly juxtaposed against the ending of summer, the beginning of the end of the year, the death of all the green things again as winter overtakes us. It can make me feel complicated and mixed up inside. It always has. Yet it's a very vibrant time, as well.

It seems like Fall itself has come a little fast this year, too. Summer sort of gave up without a fight on the first day of school. Suddenly it's darker longer in the morning, and earlier at night. And the weather seems to have flipped a switch, getting almost instantly cooler.

I also find that my boys look so much older on Monday night than they did on Sunday morning. And saying things like that makes me seem so much older that I feel like I should be.

Today was Leemur's first full day of school. I hope he's doing well. He never has anything to tell me about school yet, and every time I ask him he says that he can't be expected to remember all the way till I get home a 8 o'clock! I hope his memory gets better as the school year gets into full swing. I really do want to know what he's doing and how things are going.

So much to look forward to. So much already done. Shhhh, let me have just 5 minutes more of now before tomorrow gets here.