October is a Season of Steadfast Change

 In october you can feel the change in the air.  Every day is different than the one before.  Every Friday night gets dark quite a bit earlier than the one before it. It can be over 100 degrees where one member of the family lives while another is telling you that the temperatures dropped 65 degrees overnight and they have snow.

 Spring flowers get confused and sneak in a few new blooms while fall flowers start to show their glory and the leaves begin to outshine them all.  Fruits are plentiful and free in their abundance but already beginning to over-ripen.  The warm blackberry scented air starts to carry the smell of decaying leaves and fermentation.

"I - L- Y combined in sign language says, I Love You"

 Days that are cold and foggy in the morning leave you sweaty and breathless in the afternoon heat. Kids are back in school but the sense of summer lingers and yet Christmas things are already popping up in the stores.

For months I seem to not sell any of my books.  I carry them with me and chat about them, I write about them and tweet about them and work on the next ones but very little happens.  Then that too, changes.  I have a copy with me and don't mention it, and someone asks me if he can look at it.  Then a week later he tells me, "Well, I have bad news.  I can't give your book back" but that is because he gave it to the school district with the directions to order him a set of 36 for his class and the suggestion that it should be taught by all the 5th grade teachers in the district.  Then while I'm still smiling over that, a teacher from another school mentions that she is using the same book as a read-aloud to her class.  I know it is still baby steps, but that is perfect for Double Time on The Oregon Trail because this huge continent was crossed one baby step at a time.

 So while I welcome fall with jars of home canned blackberry jam and stacks of firewood stored up in the hope of defeating the cold ahead. While I stock up on candles for the inevitable dark, and stroll on the beach in a last celebration of warmth and light - I think about change and progress.  I think that the old, "the more things change the more they stay the same," is proven true once again.

 Every October I feel the same changes happening, new but steadfastly familiar as the earth repeats a pattern ancient and sure.  Every October I turn nostalgic and compare where I am to where I was and where I hope to go.  I work with the kids at school and realize I once taught their parents.  I write my stories and take my pictures and tell the people in my life that I adore them.  I know each October finds a few new people in my life and a few old ones missing, but I carry them in my heart and take the baby steps toward the day when i get to hold them in my arms once more.

Sunflower Seasons

  This season is long and stretches from March to October where I live.  I start sprouting the seeds in early to mid March and then move them into small cups.  In April the rain is pouring and I dig up the ground, being amazed each year at how thickly covered with grass and weeds it has become over the winter here.  Some years the ground is rock hard, but this spring was so wet it was more like trying too dig in chocolate pudding.

 When I put the seedlings in the ground the first year I was here, I was stunned to find they all vanished overnight.  16 years later I am ruthless on the slugs and snails.  This year they mostly won anyway.  I planted 60 sunflowers and got 9 flowers to reach blooming.  The rain washed away most of the slug bait before I even got back in the house.

 Being addicted to Big's Dill pickle sunflower seeds, I don't eat the seeds I grow, those extend the season and entertain by attracting the clownlike acrobatics of Stellars Jays, and usually volunteer sunflowers mean I get more plants than I actually planted.

 Last year the summer was grey and foggy and the flowers grew but were thin and tall and as soon as they had blooms they couldn't stay standing.

 I never know quite what I will get, but this is one of those things I do for both the routine and the surprise.  I love the little moments of surprising joy that the flash of yellow and the shriek of Jays provide to my Fall, but I also love the green sprout from a dry seed and the seedling that has finally become big enough to resist the snails on its own.  I love the reminder of the passage of time and the reminder that the more things change, the more they stay predictably the same.

 To anyone else who enjoys the common glory of the sunflower.  Have a blessed season because each season brings its own beauty.  Even the season of waiting in the dark to begin to grow again.