A Week from the First Day of Autumn….

The first day of fall is a week from today and will technically mark my third prairie autumn. I’m always a tad confused by this bit of calendar counting. We moved to Nebraska from West Virginia right around the 4^th of July, 2008. So, while we’ve lived here just over two years, it’s the third autumn I’ll experience in the flatlands.

Is that right? Ah, math and semantics…the former my nemesis, the latter my solace.

A few more weeks forward marks the one-year anniversary of this blog. Erik, my older son, would have just left for his second sojourn to German. I would have still been carrying around the last ‘Erik goes to Germany’ pounds and facing the prospect of turning the big 5-0.

Hence, I decided to do what writers do: procrastinate by blogging.

Even so, productivity this year has not been at an all-time low…a couple books got written, and currently my mom and I are thrilled to be working on a Christmas novella for our current publisher.

My three-times-a-week blog has become weekly if not sporadic.

And I’ve dropped, if not all the pounds I wanted to, quite a few. Even more importantly, I haul my behind out of bed every morning to get to the local YMCA and take great classes taught by awesome instructors… I come home, eat breakfast, gulp coffee, and walk.

A far different lifestyle then the work practically 24/7 one I lived previously.

And thanks to the wonders of a social media site, I can be in contact with old friends and much-loved students, many of whom are getting married, having babies, becoming the wonderful adults they were destined to be.

So this morning as I’m walking, glad for the long-sleeved tee I pulled out since there’s a real chill in the air, sadness overwhelms me.

In just shy of three months, I will turn 51. I think about the friends I’ve lost, some who didn’t see 40, others who didn’t see 50. I so embrace my life and am so reminded again of the finite-ness of it.

Again, I am reminded of the wonder and sorrow of holding on and letting go.