Summer again for a little while

As so often happens in September, hot late-summer air and a tinge of humidity have returned, and I'm finding the weather very comforting. When I was a kid, I remember that the weather would often turn summer-like just after school began, and back then it bothered me. I wanted crisp, dry, fall air evocative of chilly afternoons and calling for cable knit sweaters with jeans, not more of the summer I was already tired of lingering on.

But today I welcome the hot sunshine after several days of fall-like briskness. It reminds me that summer is still hanging on a little longer, and we don't quite have to give up on the season yet. There's still time for more swimming, for running in a tank top and shorts rather than layers of fleece, for more ice cream that melts faster than we can eat it. It reminds me that so many things in life ebb and flow more than start and stop. With obvious exceptions, like life itself, many things do not have a full-stop ending: they build, diminish, but then sometimes return. Good things like old friendships (I'm off to visit a high school friend on Sunday with whom my almost 30-year relationship has definitely ebbed and flowed, rather than started and stopped), my love of biking (I did so much of it in my 20's, and so little when the kids were very young, and now we're gradually turning into a family that can bike together), my sense of security in many aspects of my life. Bad things both large and small like ongoing disagreements that build, then recede, then begin again; and bad habits, like disorganization or poor punctuality, that I conquer only to deal with all over again. And maintaining sensible eating habits, and dealing with seasonal allergies.

As much as there are some things I wish could just end and be done with, mostly I take comfort in knowing how many elements in my life are like the tide and the seasons: building, receding, cycling around again. And so too the hot weather: undeniably here throughout August, absent for the first few days of September, now back. With some obvious exceptions, life mostly makes circles rather than straight lines, and there's comfort to be found in knowing that this too -- whatever "this" may be -- will pass, but return, only to recede again, and then recur again.

Running Streak Day 755 - 1.7 miles in the afternoon, down to Clark Farm and then up to pick up Holly at school.