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End of summer. A heck of a time.

At some point, everything I have written here has become seasonal. Maybe it's the farming heritage - it's the only way I can see things. The only contact I have with natural order is the turning of calendar pages.

When this next page turns, we will find ourselves in September. Fall.

Fall is rushed, though - mid-August and the Littles find themselves returning to school. Orientation today was intimidating, for me at least. A reminder of past slips - a swirling glimpse into another year of deadlines and accountability. The work itself, at least, looks exciting - the teachers enthusiastic. They all-but glowed from within - giddy about the year ahead, fresh faces, and the practical applications of all their teacherly knowledge.

School, in these early years, is a wondrous place. Especially the first days of a school year. Those unsharpened pencils, new seating assignments, and pinchy shoes conspire to make Every Bit of It look promising.

I started a job simultaneously. In the financial sector. A place I found myself, somewhat incongruously, ten years ago - and now find myself there again. An accident is no longer an accident once it appears more to be force of habit. Intimidating stuff, numbers - and there is irony in my alignment with financial matters. But day three is tomorrow - and I will return, and will learn, and will fake the parts in between while I gather enough information to be credible.

But first I will wake three sleepers. I will move them from bed to tooth-brushing. I will dress them in new clothes. I will be sad that each is wearing last years' shoes (purchased slightly too big) and will cheer myself with bright white socks. At 7:30, they will leave. I will see them off, but I will not drive them there, and I will not be there to pick them up at 2:30 and 3.

I will go to work, and I will be a little maudlin, but no one yet knows me to even notice that.

I will wonder about them all day. I will imagine their day, then their year - and will hope against hope that we will get assignments in on time, that there will be victories small and large.... that Sebastian will be more conscious about his school work, and that he makes new good, kind friends; that Annabeth bounces out of bed early each day and develops a love for school, success, and math facts; and that Patrick proves himself to be an enthusiastic contributor, a charming playmate, and a non-violent member of the class.

Every one of us will be hard at work on an agenda written by someone else. But we will be doing it simultaneously, and we will come together for a taco supper and will talk about it: our days, our year ahead, our lives shard and separate, parallel and intersecting.

(The picture is from the first day of school -and the post a few days earlier. Written August 17 - I didn't even realize I hadn't posted it...)

Borders

I wonder, at 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning, where this post will land.

I am awake, again and still. No real reason why. My brain hasn't fixed on one thing, the thing that has me awake and troubled - rather it flits through things. Page after page of small anxiety: there is a perpetual laundry basket on my unfurnished bedroom's floor, my office has some papers that have been on the desk a year, our garage is a bit too full of unfiltered clutter, and Annabeth didn't read enough this summer.

A couple of undisciplined hours of non-musing of that sort, and I found myself here. I went through phone pictures and came upon this one, from the summer. Mid-summer, with family, on the Bay, that I wrote about in July. I like it.

It looks like change, this picture. The green of grass, the brown of cut wheat. It looks like human imprint on nature, of protected agricultural space in an area near water - always in danger of being over-developed. It looks, to me, like quiet and someone else's property line (which I know it to be), and it looks like 8:30 in a morning with no real agenda and a desire to push through to the end of a run (also, which I know it to be.)

As of Wednesday of this week, the rest of us will all have Somewhere to be. The older two start school - with backpacks too loaded for their size and homework assignments. Expectations - theirs for a new year, and those thrust upon them by the rest of us. First and fourth grades. Lofty stuff.

Gavin will minister guidance and reassurances to the older set at the same school- those anxious to leave, and the parents that watch them go. I will marvel at that process and wonder about when our kids are that age - if knowing the college process, if being on the periphery of so many teenagers (between football and college counseling... around 100/year... for 20 years - give or take - thousands of kids...) will make it any easier for us when ours matriculate.

Of course, it won't. Not really.

For my littles, it is the special new that is the beginning of a school year. The new that is specific to elementary school: sharpened pencils and book bags with zippers that still stick a little. Scuffless shoes, and sharp haircuts. Skin still warm from extra sun. Brains that fell so easily into not-so-much, now creakily trying to grab hold of words from new teachers' mouths. School lunches on little green trays at weird hours of the morning. Friends not seen in months to whisper to from desks still perfectly ordered.

They all just live here. And for those parents of now teens, their kids live there for even shorter. The littles - more and more as they grow - believe themselves to be wholly separate from us. We know different.. but for this to work, we have to pretend we agree with their version of things.

We are all of us always on the edge of something. For me now, the edge of sleep. The edge of another day. The edge of a new week, and the edge of a new year. The periphery of other lives led, influencer and influenced. I will shuffle them off to school at 7:30 each day. And for a few days - the silence will alternately welcome and confuse me.

Onward.

Monday

He did it, he started! His fourth place to be all day, every day - his first true 'school,' with bigger kids. I teared up, he was unfazed.

pPod starts school Monday.

Public school. The first to do that, oddly enough. Pre-K. Sweet, young, scrubbed, happy, demanding 4-year-olds. 20 of them.

We will walk there. Half a mile. Every morning, through three seasons. Just two of us. We will have stuff to talk about. Every afternoon, we will walk home. We will have Things to Do.

He of white-blond hair and constant chatter. Recent discoverer of computer games. Drawer of pictures, observer of details through his little bifocal lenses.

I like this part - standing here, knowing that in a year this will be the past. I like that we are here Before, and most everything else is after.

I don't like this other part, where soon all this will be gone. Where that little bit of baby, as I say to him, still remaining behind his left ear, might disappear without my realizing it. That I will barely remember this in two years. In four, he will be 8, with all his 8-year-old demands. I will struggle to remember him at 4, the way I do now the two-year-old him.

4, to me, sounds like the end of Little.

He had his hair cut today. When will it be his last little-boy mushroom cut?

I call him over to me, and he instinctively gives me a kiss. He sometimes asks, "am I in trouble?" Disbelieving. His temper can spark and flare. He can scream. I can, too - and I am embarrassed when he sees it. It flames out, and he often returns with his eyes down, a ready apology.

He is optimistic. He is mostly unfazed. He observes and he tracks and he saves it for later. He quotes advertisements like he thought of them, and he shares thoughts of his own that sound written. At the tail end, he is ever in danger of being left out, or over-ruled. He thrives on attention, for moments of being considered equal to anyone, to anything. He holds forth.

He is right there on the edge of the rest of his life. And on Monday, I will walk him a few more steps closer.