Hello "last" week of summer...

Oh Sunday how I love you so so so much.  Sundays are so strange for me - I love them and the slower pace they afford but I also loathe them as I am one of those folks who gets anxious over the start of another work week.  Why?  I haven't the slightest idea.  In the back of my brain from about afternoon I start getting that anxious feeling about how tomorrow will be Monday.

Of course once Monday rolls in I'm fine with it.  So strange.

Today though - this Sunday we're sitting upon - this Sunday is more.  This Sunday is the one I consider the last of summer.  Never mind our Carolina temperatures will continue to bask in the upper eighties and nineties for a few more weeks (I love it) and no worries over humidity levels increasing to the largest ones we feel through the year.  We still have that glorious sunshine even though it has started putting itself to bed around 8:30 PM here instead of nine or thereafter.

I am following the mainstream when I say that this is the last week of summer.  Though I don't care much for mainstream the idea that next weekend will culminate the summer 2020 is something that I fall susceptible to.  The kids in the north will return to school.  My kids have been in school three weeks.  Football season will attempt to kick off in a mere fourteen (?) days.  My garden is shriveled and has relaxed on production.  The pumpkins are being picked.  The pseudo pumpkins are swirled in beverages at Dunkin' and Starbucks.  And my babies are one year older.

That is really what it is for me.  My favorite season is closed each year by the beginning of a new age.  First, my son.  This year he moved from seven years to being two years short of two whole hands in years circling the sun.  On Friday my firstborn will walk into her first day of being a real teenager.  Thirteen.  I could say it feels like she was born just yesterday but it doesn't.  It feels right for her to be thirteen.  It didn't seem to come at the speed of light but more at the speed of sound.  It was fast but not so fast that I feel like I have lost precious time.  In five years I will write this differently.  

In five years...

That truly isn't very long at all.  She will be considered a legal adult who can do things like vote or serve alcohol as a waitress for a part time job.  Her brother will be entering his teen years.  Strange how that all works.

As the bathing suits are packed away the softball cleats come back out.  Another nod to the change of the seasons.  Fall ball - just softball this year no soccer due to the pandemic.  I looked at my calendar this morning - at all the glorious blank spaces and thought of how quickly they will be filled in with "practice" or "game" and "double header".  

By trying to be ahead of the game (pun kind of intended) I started making out the menu for September.  Chili, chili pie, roast...all those comfort foods coming back into play even though I know very well the house will have to freeze us out to make that food taste the way it should when you serve it on a day that hit eighty-nine degrees.

At the top of my staircase is a wagon filled with bags of fall decorations.  Mainly it is all for Halloween because eight year olds live for Halloween candy.  Over at Lowe's Home Improvements mums are 2/$10.  Next weekend on my planner I have a sticky note that reads:

• *Clean out the summer garden
• *Plant mums
• *Put out the fall decorations
• *MOW FIRST

Because I am a true Southern girl my summer dresses are preparing to go into the closet where they sleep until April of the next year while the booties and darker shades are preparing to take their spots.  New York may say you can wear all those whites year round but at nearing thirty-nine years old it was well embedded in my thick skull that after Labor Day you put the white away.  

And so it is time to start putting some things away like the summer of the pandemic.  But first - we must go get slushies one day after work, pluck the remaining fruit from the garden, burn our butts on the leather seat of the car, and wear all the tropical prints we can fit in seven days.

Here's to the last week of summer!

xo