About seasons of food and life.
Appropriate soundtrack: “The Boys Are Too Refined” by The Hush Sound
Sometimes I like being an adult. It’s nice. I’ve got important things to do and I have quantifiable tasks I can use to show how competent I am being. I like it. I feel like I’m actually doing something worthwhile and am generally pretty happy with sense of achievement I get from it, but sometimes I just need the chaos to stop for a while. I need to keep my external world as simple and serene as possible so I don’t lose my mind. So, after buying a new car, buying a laptop complete with customer service calls and a visit from a technician, multiple doctor’s appointments, ceaseless errands that have to be done right now, bills, groceries, and all the other normal things I have to do to maintain living, I get a tiny bit overwhelmed.
It’s not the adulthood that I mind: it’s the never-ending maintenance of the said adulthood. I sometimes wish I could hire a part-time version of me to take care of things while I take a breath. And to think, I don’t even have little humans running around to take care of! I won the trophy for being an adult, can I be done now? No wonder people retire at 65; they just want to be able to sit down and actually breathe for about ten minutes (and by “ten minutes” I mean “twenty years”). Is that too much to ask? No. I know. It’s all science and it’s all a game.
The best description I have for the weather the last few days is bi-polar. The Saturday of Labor Day weekend it was 104 degrees. Two days later it was 55, and it has barely climbed back up to 70 since. This is the preview of fall. There were pumpkins on the corners of the displays at the grocery store and there was a palette-size display in the main aisle full of pretty bottles of the harbinger of fall, Witches Brew, a spiced red wine from a Michigan winery.
I felt kind of stupid, but while going through the drive-through of Culver’s seeing new promotions, I asked the blue speaker box “How long will you have the Pumpkin Cheesecake ice cream around?” I missed it last year and am determined to make sure it doesn’t happen again. “We’ll have it for the fall and halfway through winter.” Shamrock shakes : Spring :: Pumpkin cheesecake ice cream : Fall.
I don’t so much look forward to the seasons coming up as much as I look forward to the transition. It gave me a weird thrill seeing the new decorations out in Meijer. I’ll forget the fact that it was almost eighty outside for my birthday last year. That’s okay. Bring on the cider mills! Weird sweaters! The cracking leaves on the ground! Pumpkin pie! Bright lights against jet black skies while out for dinner! Fuzzy boots! You get the idea. I thoroughly enjoy the switching of seasons. It’s nice for my brain because we’re coming up on the time of year where I pull out all the internal history books and mentally travel my way back through everything.
Spring is for awakening happiness, new breath; summer is for creativity and bliss; fall is for analysis and nostalgia, and winter is for resting and rumination. So as much as the approaching seasons peeve people, I actually anticipate them in a weird way because my body and mind experience different seasons too. I’ve had a lot of the brightness, now it’s time for memories and blankets.
Bring it.
What about you? What do you look forward to in the changing of seasons?
Photo credit: Flickr / kelsey_lovefusionphoto
