Season for Resolutions

It has rained, sometimes violently, for the past four days.  A welcomed sight.  We kept the windows opened, listening to the wind and water hit the house, the dew entering our lungs.  This rain, it can keep falling.  This summer, the fires spread across the state, leaving the air thick and the sky grim.  Friends and family on the other side of the mountains, as we say here, prayed the line would hold and spare their communities. Burn bans held and the rain stayed away.  This was the summer without bonfires, aware of the danger one spark could produce in the backyard.

Now, the rain falls.  It is a familiar sound, smell, and temperature.  We are ready for the fall and however it may begin to heal.

I've said too many times before, fall is my New Year's Eve. It makes more sense in my rational, sentimental, and occasionally skeptical brain to even attempt resolution making in the dead of winter.  After the high of the holidays and the lows of the dark and cold days? No one succeeds.  But right now with the promise of the best fashion has to offer and vibrant color-changing leaves?  The iron is hot.

Today was my last day of summer vacation and I'm relieved.  I've found something out about myself in the last few years.  Only, it's something recently present but I guess people can change and are ever evolving.  I LIKE working.  I thrive on the routine and schedule.  I define success in large part to what I am able to accomplish in my career.  So this staying home business, away from the interaction and ability to impact other's lives, it's so not for me.  I worry someday this feeling will be made out as wrong.  To which I'll have to reply something snarky and get on with it.  The new year, with new work-day tasks and goals.  I am celebrating.

This last day of summer I got stung by a wasp/yellow jacket/I'm still unsure.  I reached for the vase which displays my finest dahlias and immediately felt the sting when my finger dipped below the petals.  The finger swelled and the perpetrator was no where to be found.  Later, as the reddened area cooled, the insect was crawling at the back screen door waiting to be let out.  It is time to get out of the house, I agreed.

My resolutions are the same: write, move, laugh, experience, record, do better, and understand more. Less iPhone pictures, more with the real camera.   Heartier, sustainable meals.  Classical music.  Vinyl records.  Pen to paper.  Long talks about issues and ideas.  Walks with greater distances.  I ask myself lately if what I am doing right now is making me better, smarter, more compassionate and understanding of others.  Am I engaging my muscles and benefiting my body.  Am I reengaging areas of my mind.  Am I doing all I can?

It is fall, though the calendar says otherwise,  I can feel it.  We'll keep the windows open for months to let the fall air take over.