“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose”

You’d think summer would be my favorite season, having months off to write and swim and sleep late and eat the best of garden veggies, and it is, but there is something about fall that brings waves of nostalgia like I can’t describe. Fall makes me feel, as does each season, but fall is in a class all its own.

It might be that it always makes me feel like I’m still young. I’m still the teenager Rosemary. School starting. Back-to-school shopping and tights and sweaters and UGGs. Halloween afoot. The colors and smells of pies and apple picking and pumpkins and cool, brisk air that lets you know you’re alive. Maybe it brings me back to days of first loves and leaf fights and innocence and innocence lost. Bonfires and football games and cheerleading and back-to-school dances. Maybe it’s because I teach and those things haven’t changed all that much.

I really don’t know why, because it’s this strange feeling I get when fall is on the horizon. It’s such a strange emotion, I can’t even describe it. It’s an anxious excitement. It’s not all good, and yet, I clutch at its strength, its power. It’s like every sense is reawakened somehow and every emotion on the spectrum. Maybe that’s why. Maybe summer is too ‘easy.’ Maybe there isn’t as much meaning in easy. Maybe it reminds that I don’t like standing still. Maybe it reminds me of how easily I get bored.
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But often, and probably as long as I live, it will remind of my mother and the difficult relationship we had. (CLICK HERE to see a former BLOG about my mother.) It’s not only because of the anniversary of her death, but it’s remembering our “fall” fights.  We fought the strongest during those early fall months. We couldn’t agree on clothes or hair or make-up. Dance classes would start up again, and the insecurities blossomed bigger, the pressure ever heavy, even as I needed to dance just as I needed to breathe. We loved each other under the most complicated of terms right up until her death. But it was love. 
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Maybe falls reminds me that some days, I wish I could do a redo. And maybe every fall reminds me that I can’t. I CAN, however, do right now…and I better start figuring out what RIGHT NOW looks like. Maybe I need to let go of what others think I should be, and instead, let all my worries and inhibitions fall, a leaf from a tree that realizes when it's time to let go. Maybe  “to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose” is true. And maybe,  I need to start living as I was meant. Me. My season. The purpose I divine.