P is for Procrastination

Note: Planned to post this Tuesday…but take note of the title.

November is officially halfway over, and I’m just now packing away my summer clothes. “Packing” may be pushing the definition. So far I’ve taken about half a dozen shirts off hangers, folded, and tossed in a clear plastic bin. At the rate I’m going, it’ll be spring by the time I finish the job.

I wrote those words yesterday but am tackling the job anew today. The container is filling up, and soon I’ll be ready for a second one. Putting sweaters into drawers is a job that can wait for another day. Soon I’m heading out to meet my neighborhood walking pal.

Folding haphazardly…I never worked retail and that’s probably a good thing…I’m blinking back tears. Summer, like the rest of this year, was filled with soaring highs and dipping lows.

As the sun begins to set on another year, I’m filled with infinite joys and sorrows for reasons I can’t even articulate.

Never did I think a pink polo shirt would have the power to render me mute. Years ago almost-twenty-year-old Erik and I had a spirited discussion about whether a pair of athletic shorts that he and his dad had just purchased fit properly. I’ve long since forgotten what was really bugging me, but it wasn’t the sizing of a pair of nylon athletic wear.

Since then the phrase “It’s like the shorts” has become a permanent part of the lexicon around here. When someone gets upset about a seemingly silly thing, and it’s really about something much deeper, we dredge out that phrase and somehow we all know to back off and let the subtext subside.

So later when I place the rest of my summer clothes in the sterile containers and the tears start to flow, I’ll remind myself "It’s like the shorts" and snap the lid on the subtext.

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.

So long, summer

All week I’ve looked high and low (well, the Google search engine equivalent) for just the right poem, quote, or even song lyric about the end of summer and the advent of autumn.

Yes, I know fall doesn’t ‘officially’ start until September 23^rd this year. But c’mon, don’t we all mentally shift seasonal gears when Labor Day rolls around?

It seems like only yesterday, or last week at least, that my younger son and I were sitting around the dinner table talking about the end of school. Actually, it was mid-May, and summer loomed full of promise and possibilities.

After a brutal winter and blustery spring here on the prairie, we were all ready for summer. And our weather was nothing compared to the conditions that socked the mid-Atlantic and Eastern seaboard regions. Those were Mike Tyson-esque punches that kept on pummeling. Like all years, 2010 so far has been rife with highs and lows.

I won’t go into the lows because I’m trying to veer from my usual more maudlin ‘fare’ and write a humorous funny blog about saying ‘so long, summer.’

But one thing I learned all the years my mother and I wrote romantic comedy for Harlequin, is that true humor requires pathos to balance it out...just like life.

Crying over the bad and laughing at the good sometimes morphs into tears of laughter and smiles of sadness.

In bidding adieu to August, I’m reflecting on the highs and lows of the season about to pass…even if not officially.

Saying at least nobody died does a bit of a disservice to June and her sisters, July and August. But after a sad winter, I tend to categorize things that way.

This summer did have Herculean highs, along with several tail-dragging lows. But isn’t every season like that? Isn’t that what life is all about?

We cherish the good times and mourn the bad, and life moves forward.

Just like the calendar.

Spring is in the air…or not?

March is less than a week away, but it seems an eternity right now.

The mid-Atlantic region of the country got hit a lot harder than we did on the prairie this winter. But it started snowing in October here, completely bypassing fall.

At least my high schooler, Andrew, has only had a handful of snow days. In some areas of West Virginia, where we resided for 15 years, the kids have missed three weeks of school.

Facebook status updates announce gleefully that garbage pickup has finally resumed. I remember those days…watching the cans sit out pitifully at the side of the road, frozen solid into the snow.

It’s not even the lack of sunshine here. We get a lot more wintry blue sky than we ever did in the east, though not as much as in Flagstaff. The sun shone every day there, it seemed like. Except maybe the March when I was a new mom with a three-month-old baby, and it snowed 80 inches that month. Yes, eighty. Eight zero.

That’s a lot of snow.

I wasn’t deterred, however. I’d load Erik into his car seat and maneuver baby and seat into our tiny Chevy Sprint to go to a moms and tots group. Okay he was a little young, but the camaraderie was priceless. When Erik was two-and-a-half, we moved to Morgantown, West Virginia. It rained every single day that fall. Seriously. I used to take my little boy to the park in a drizzly mist, letting him shuffle through the sodden wood chips and hope we’d meet some other moms and tots.

The only other person I ever saw that autumn was a stay-at-home dad with two little boys in tow. When I suggested a play date, he looked like he’d been attacked by a giant anaconda. Apparently, co-ed play dates were verboten.

It was a miserable fall. Somehow Erik and I survived.

He has wonderful friends scattered to colleges near and far and overseas on gap-year adventures. I miss his friends and mine.

After a year and a half in Nebraska, I like the new friends I’ve made too.

One thing we all have in common, is we’re all sick of winter. No matter where we reside in the country, female or male, we’re all weary of winter.

And that, my dear friends, is comforting.