It’s been a couple months since I’ve written on here. Late August and early September were spent preparing for my son to start school and then for us to take a family trip to Colorado, both of which have been wonderful. I love a good routine, and the three mornings per week that Sol goes to preschool have been a beautiful mix of fun for him, structure for our family, and breathing room for me. But I also loved uprooting that routine for 10 days to see friends and family and make it back onto some hiking trails while the aspens were in peak form.
Since this week brought October and a sort of second back-to-school season for our family, I’m sharing an autumnal piece I wrote a couple of years ago that has been gathering dust in my Google Drive. I do so while holding in my heart the people for whom Hurricane Helene brought devastating, unexpected change.
I hope you all are enjoying the start to my favorite season.
Summer’s End
Each year, the autumnal equinox ushers in the arrival of fall for the northern hemisphere. There is a moment when the sun shines directly on the equator, and the north and the south get an equal amount of rays. Summer is giving way to fall in the north, while winter is giving way to spring in the south. Nights and days are roughly equal. Hot is balanced with cold; chaos is balanced with order; death is balanced with new life. Neither season prevails over another.
It is a fleeting moment; one that is often lost amid the shuffle of daily life – the washing of dishes, the cleaning up of toys, the shelving of groceries, the swapping of hospital shifts. Fall announces its arrival in a whisper, and most of us don’t hear it.
We hurry through our days with the summer pool bag still hanging by the door, until one morning we will wake up to frost, dig out the bin of sweaters, and realize the days of 80 degree afternoons are behind us. The darkness of the nights creep up as they become longer than the days. The leaves yellow in hue, and our steps crunch louder as they accumulate on the sidewalks.
As a child, the passing of summer was more predictable – marked not by the equinox, but by an unavoidable date on the calendar when school would once again begin. On that date, my fresh, crisp folders would start to gather papers, my days of sleeping in would abruptly shift to a 6:30 alarm, my athletic shorts were swapped for my plaid uniform, and my evenings of catching fireflies gave way to homework and early bedtimes.
There was a clear divide between chaos and order. As a child, this meant unscheduled play past my bedtime. As a teenager, this meant trying to suck the nectar out of this limited season of freedom, and in doing so, becoming a more reckless version of myself.
Yet, summer always ended. School started again, and I slipped back into my familiar structure, ready to continue getting A’s, attending youth group, and applying to college. The chaos was over – until next summer.
Adulthood, I’ve found, has less defined seasons. There are moments we are told will be salient. We expect to know when we are on the precipice of change; that we will toe the line of a new season, waiting for the starting horn to blow. And sometimes that happens – the pains of childbirth are a fairly good indicator that life is about to change for good. But even then, when the moment of birth occurs and you meet your child for the first time, it is not until much later, when some of the fog of exhaustion and pain has lifted, that you see your child laughing and realize you have somehow lived into the life you once hoped for.
More often, as far as I can tell, seasons pass while we are busy with other things.
We pass the plates around the Thanksgiving table, not knowing it will be the last one where everyone will be together – drawn apart by death, or marriage, or pure lack of effort. We find ourselves at new tables, with new people, and wonder where our old traditions have gone.
We walk down the aisle, hand in hand with the person we have committed to for life, but don’t feel any different. It doesn’t hit us until weeks later as we are doing their laundry or eating a meal they have cooked: this is what partnership looks like.
We rock our babies to sleep, wishing for a time when they will not need us so much, and then, slowly, without us noticing, it happens. Their scooting on the floor becomes crawling, their crawling becomes pulling up, their pulling up becomes cruising along furniture, and their cruising becomes walking. There is a last time they sleep on us, a last time they ask us to hold them, and a last time that we tuck them in for bed.
We look in the mirror every morning, and one day, notice a wrinkle we hadn’t seen before. We wonder how it got there, and how many smiles it took to make that little crease.
We call our loved ones like we always have, but one day things feel different, and we can’t put a finger on it. We wonder when, and why, this has happened – have we changed? Or have they?
As I wrote this, the autumnal equinox came and went. I got up at precisely 9:04pm to step outside, to see if I could feel the Earth’s pristine solar placement, balancing the sun on its side.
I couldn’t. My pensive look up into the sky was interrupted by a man playing some sort of show on his phone as he walked his dog in front of my house. The dog saw me and growled as the man scolded it to keep moving. I breathed in the cool air, I paced around to see the stars, and then I went back inside, with barking and talking still in the background.
But soon I’ll put away my summer clothes, and one morning I’ll wake up to run at my usual time only to realize it is now too dark out. The pumpkins that have been out on porches for a month will seem less out of place. I’ll see that the warm weather is gone for good, and I will wonder when it all changed.
Yours,
'Apache Christ' icon removed from New Mexico mission, shocking parishioners by Gina Christian - Thanks to Renée Roden for putting this important story on my radar, which highlights how racism and colonialism is still all too present in our Church. As I was reading this, I was reminded of this story about an icon of Jesus resembling George Floyd that was stolen at the Catholic University of America a few years ago. I was also wondering what Teresa Rojo Tsosie would think.
Give it Six Weeks by Shauna Niequist - A must-read on the topic of fall change. I am a big fan of Shauna’s, but I somehow hadn’t subscribed to her substack until recently. She never fails to inspire me, and this timely post left me feeling seen. In particular, her insight that the thought “must be nice” is a red flag indicating “there’s something I really want but am not allowing myself to have, like rest or care or softness.” Self-care is a journey, and, as she says, hard, important work.
Octomom by Radiolab - They recently did a rerun of this episode that aired in 2020, and it had a whole new meaning for me now that I am a mom hearing it again four years later. Apparently Octopus moms a) decide when to use sperm to fertilize their eggs and b) die when their babies hatch. It’s a story of an Octopus who sat on her eggs for 4.5 years, slowly withering away while protecting her babies, which was only made possible by mega mom-brain that turned off all of her non-necessary functions.