The New Year

As someone who has spent a pretty hefty portion of my adult life in school, finishing my bachelor's degree then graduate school, then married to an academic, plus having a kid in elementary school, I am keenly attuned to the start of the school year. In fact, late August feels like the beginning of a new year to me. January 1^st just feels like the end of the holidays.

This time of year is fraught with change and transition. You can smell it in the air. As a child, it meant new clothes, often a new school and a chance to reinvent myself. In college, it was an escape from my childhood home into the place where I really learned who I was and what mattered most to me. For years, autumn meant the return of someone I loved, someone who would drift away in the late spring and summer and returning to me when the Fall semester breezes began to blow.

My sister and I have commented on this for years, how we both begin to feel a shift, a kind of restlessness in August. It makes me a little anxious and also a little excited about what might lie ahead. It feels like something new is just around the corner, something more substantial than new school clothes and an armload of binders.

I cannot blame it on the weather. August is miserably hot here in South Texas, and we still have a lot of heat ahead of us before things begin to cool off. No matter what the temperature, I still feel the season's change, in my bones, in my heart and head as surely as if there were maples turning crimson in the backyard.

I like the anticipation, leaning hard into what's ahead, even if I don't know what that is.