Thursday, August 28, 2003
If you're the kind of person who can smell a rainstorm coming, sense an imminent earthquake, or who just knows the day a season has turned, then you will appreciate that today was for me that day. It is that one day that comes on the heels of late summer. On the one hand the end-of-August-evening-sun slants in such a way that every object is glazed in a lucious surreal light that just takes the breath away. On the other hand the sun sits lower in the sky at six o'clock as I make my way back across the causeway on my four-mile dog walk. It is Nor'East cooler and drier. And there is some kind of intangible demise to the air -- of things dying not growing. You can't quite put your finger on it but you know it's there.
I mind not the shorter days and slightly dropping temperatures. It is the inevitable sentimentality that fall triggers in me that I mind. Like an asthma attack, I am suddenly strangled by memories that criss-cross my forty-three years. One moment I am staring at the patterns of the gray upholestery that lined the little jump seat in the VW beetle that hauled me and my parents through Europe the first four years of my life (I am the Poster Childthat you don't necessarily need a primary color, playworld-of-toys to grow up to be a semi-creative person....). The next moment my mind leaps to adulthood to the many people who have sprung gloriously into my life only to disappear abrubtly at the next change of a job, relocation to a new city, or jump into new circumstances. Poof, gone.
Wait a minute.... My son is going off to college tomorrow. The daughter is soon to be entrenched in her high school senior year of college essays, applications, and sorrowful good-byes to all-that-you-knew-since-you-were-two. Hubby has office in fabuluous section of London. Hmmm. OK, ok I will feel my month of sentimental whatevers. Then hello world of many millions of people and many new wonderful opportunities!
The great thing about being a born-in-Californian is that you are by nature an incurable opptimist that no matter what sees new bright sides. Earthquakes? What earthquakes? Arhnold? Why not. Just look at that sunset! Darling pour me a glass of wine...
I mind not the shorter days and slightly dropping temperatures. It is the inevitable sentimentality that fall triggers in me that I mind. Like an asthma attack, I am suddenly strangled by memories that criss-cross my forty-three years. One moment I am staring at the patterns of the gray upholestery that lined the little jump seat in the VW beetle that hauled me and my parents through Europe the first four years of my life (I am the Poster Childthat you don't necessarily need a primary color, playworld-of-toys to grow up to be a semi-creative person....). The next moment my mind leaps to adulthood to the many people who have sprung gloriously into my life only to disappear abrubtly at the next change of a job, relocation to a new city, or jump into new circumstances. Poof, gone.
Wait a minute.... My son is going off to college tomorrow. The daughter is soon to be entrenched in her high school senior year of college essays, applications, and sorrowful good-byes to all-that-you-knew-since-you-were-two. Hubby has office in fabuluous section of London. Hmmm. OK, ok I will feel my month of sentimental whatevers. Then hello world of many millions of people and many new wonderful opportunities!
The great thing about being a born-in-Californian is that you are by nature an incurable opptimist that no matter what sees new bright sides. Earthquakes? What earthquakes? Arhnold? Why not. Just look at that sunset! Darling pour me a glass of wine...
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