I'm back. Finished my coffee, my cheese toast and my singular chore of turning on the sprinklers out front, something I do every ten days for one hour because we're trying hard to do our part and conserve water. We're changing over as much grass as we can. What remains is just moss and it's mostly golden yellow of deep summer anyway. We are surrounded by people with lush green expanses of heavily daily-watered lawns because none of our neighbours up the road give a shit, as long as it looks perfect.
Sigh.
The sun isn't setting that much earlier, I point out unhelpfully to Lochlan, who has been pointing out the harbingers of autumn all week. Soon it won't be so hot all the time. Soon the rain will come back. The leaves are already falling from the trees that got damaged by the heat dome and I am as always amused by the fact that some American regions send their kids back to school like, this week.
But it is, he smiles gently, softening the blow.
I don't miss the scramble for supplies, the clothes-shopping and lunch-treat shopping and endless homework, packing backpacks and watching the clock. Henry now enters the final six months of his program and he is pretty self-sufficient at twenty, showing up to have breakfast and then taking a late lunch, working on his school stuff from home, and then joining his friends on weekends, days off or online in the evenings to game or hang out.
I will miss Ruth living at home, as she's turning twenty-two and moving out. This is going to be a fall of huge changes here and yet does anything actually change? I wanted my garden to grow like crazy and now that it is, I wish it was done instead of staring down the fall of canning and processing and freezing. I want fall to be here. I want to wear sweaters and drink flavoured coffee and nap while it rains. I want to watch scary movies and decorate with pumpkins (they are growing now. Four HUGE ones out there at the very end of the garden by the service road, which is finished and allows for deliveries to Schuyler's house, Batman's or landscaping/construction materials, of which there will be no more because I am so done with all of it.
Matt has a different theory. You're just burnt out.
I know this. I know he's right. I don't know what to do about it, though.