Fits and Starts
The occasional below-seventy-degrees mornings lately have been glorious! Now the weatherman says we may get a very early cool front later this week. Be still my heart! I have said it many times, the transition from Summer to Fall is really more “New Year” than January first is for me, and probably for many people. Nearly all of us spent a minimum of twelve years with the start of the school year being an exciting and transitional time, then if you go to college that’s another four (or more) years, then if you have children, you are in that routine for another minimum of twelve years. It adds up to a lifetime of the end of August and beginning of September feeling like the tired end of one period and the beginning of an exciting, brand new period.
Now that my children and grown and gone, my “new year” has a different rhythm. There is not one demarcated day to say the new year has begun, instead it proceeds in fits and starts. The business my husband and I run has a busy season that used to slam into high gear right about the first of September then come to a screeching stop right about the last of February. As the years have gone on and as we have hired other people and diversified what we do, the busy season has a sneaky way of starting to filter in beginning in mid-August. Then it slows a bit toward the end of March, but never really completely stops. These changes are great for the growth of the business, but hard on this old girl in that there is never a time of rest and recovery.
But still, the coming of the “new year” makes me feel energized and optimistic, pulls me out of the fog that I have worked myself into over the summer. The cooler mornings have made me eager to get out on the front porch with my first cup of coffee and watch the sun rise. The hummingbirds are snapping out of it, too, preparing for their long migration back to the south. They swarm the feeder that hangs right in front of my porch rocker. I have started seeing ruby-throats in the mix, so the migration has already begun. I have found a not-precious sketchbook and fixed it up a little by covering it with a beautiful Tiffany blue and decorated it with some cutouts. Then I found a stash of brand-new yellow pencils and sharpened every one of them. The past few days I have managed at least a quick and rough sketch of something that is right in front of me—a computer mouse, the box of newly sharpened pencils, the corner of the yard fence. I had forgotten how drawing and sketching can be at once calming and stimulating for my brain and what a good feeling it is.
There have been fits and starts of that feeling of energy for the past couple of weeks, but today is the third day in a row, so I hope it is here to stay, at least for several months until the Summer doldrums get me again. And I hope you are feeling energized and optimistic, too!