Tripping Into Fall

It’s your story. Feel free to hit ‘em with a plot twist any moment. Author Unknown

The weather has cooled down significantly. The grass has turned a brilliant green as it re-awakens from its summer slumbers – a final shot at life before going back to sleep for the winter. We’ve still got some flowers blooming their heads off in the yard as they don’t seem to have gotten the memo that “the seasons – they are a changin’.”

Fall is and always has been my favorite time of year. As a child, fall meant leaving those dog days of summer behind and going back to school to rub elbows with friends and buddies I hadn’t seen for a couple of months. It meant kicking through piles of leaves that littered the sidewalks – making like an NFL kicker out to “win it” for the team. It meant watching in fascination “helicopter” seeds falling from the maple trees, spinning their way to earth.

The start of school also meant new clothes! It meant jeans that were generally too long (in September; just right around Valentine’s Day; looking pretty “high water” come school-years’ end); it meant shirts with sharp-pointed collars and rich, clearly identifiable colors; it meant full-length #2 pencils (complete with bright pink erasers and perfectly pristine points of lead); it meant a completely fresh start, with clean blackboards (which would eventually become green-boards – long before the advent of efficient (but boring) white-boards and dry-erase markers).

No one ever accused me of being a scholar back in those halcyon days of yore, but the fact is I was seldom bored. I enjoyed school. I enjoyed going to classes, as well as recess and lunch. I appreciated having each day laid out in an orderly fashion – dependable in its purpose and rhythm.

I am sure there were bullies in those days, too, but I honestly don’t remember ever having to deal with them. I do recall stepping in to break up a wrestling match where one lad was definitely bullying another kid. The bully and I wrestled a bit while the unfortunate target of his abuse ran off to safety, but when we were done that was that and nothing more ever came of it. Life rolled along and was delightful in that it was primarily and blissfully uneventful for the most part.

The scariest part of living in the 50s and 60s was the threat of nuclear war. I didn’t pay much attention to world events in those days, but the Cuban Missile Crisis during the Kennedy administration was the closest thing to feeling we were going to be vaporized and become an extinct species I’d ever felt. But I also trusted in God and in the “rightness” of the American way of life and the probability that we would come through this crisis just like we had come through the past couple of world wars. So I kept the faith and never lost hope. The fear of nuclear annihilation never dominated my attention for more than a minute or two at a time.

Those days are long gone, of course. I am in the autumnal years of my life, and just as the fall betokened new life in a strange sort of way for we school-aged wee-ones, so do these present days do the same for me now.

I am able, in retirement, to spend time doing the things that energize me. At least that’s the theory. The fact is that without the daily rhythm and routine of life’s labors, work schedules, appointments, and such what-not, I’ve had to wrestle with what it means to have that so-called leisure time. Once the house is clean, the dishes done, the lawn mowed and trimmed – what is there?

Life has been good to us. God has been good to us. Retirement is not the end of work (or life, for that matter), but an opportunity to sharpen new pencils, kick new leaves, and seek out new helicopter seeds with which to be fascinated and mesmerized. As always, we are beckoned to move forward with eyes wide open lest we trip and fall (and enjoy a Pumpkin Spice Latte, if one so wishes).

Ultimately, we each are called to continue becoming what God has called us to be here in this, our autumnal valley – God’s children, each and every one.