Today, because the Troll and I sat at breakfast, we heard the voices of children traipsing up our avenue on their manner to start a brand new yr of college. (It pleases me that the faculties in our metropolis do not start until the day after Labor Day. It appears cruel and uncommon to drag the kiddies once more to high school even as it's far nonetheless formally summertime.)
This time of 12 months continually makes me a chunk pensive. For more than ten years once I graduated from university, I could usually discover myself developing restless as August started out out drawing to a close to. Something approximately the shortening days may purpose some deep-seated stress in me, and prefer a swallow returning to Capistrano, I may sense the urge to exit and buy new notebooks and pencils and flow beautify my dorm room and get my agenda and start my new instructions. Which, of path, grow to be a profoundly frustrating urge to have once I had no new instructions to begin. All I ought to in reality do approximately it modified into flow purchase a few new pencils for which I had no actual use.
This went on until years in the past, while we bought a residence. That year, September came and went without stirring in me the longing to move
So this year, as the kids head off to another year of learning, I find myself musing about what this all means. Why did I feel the urge to go back to school each fall for so long after I had a school to go back to? And why did becoming a homeowner deflect that urge?
The best answer I can come up with so far is that because I spent the first 22 years of my life as a student (minus a couple right at the beginning), I came to think of fall as a beginning--a time for starting new things. So whenever fall came around, I would have that urge to start something new--but there was never anything new in my life to start on. So the whole urge just took the form of a helpless longing to start a new school year, to be given an assignment, to be told what to work on next. But one thing I've learned about being a homeowner is this: in a house, there's always something to work on. There's always a new project to be started. So now, when that fall restlessness hits me, it just makes me want to be up and doing whatever project is next on the list (usually something that I've been putting off all through the hot, lazy summer). I no longer need to go back to school and be given an assignment; I can come up with plenty on my own.
Or, to put it another way--I've become a grownup.
