It’s September first. The days are still warm but the nights are chilly; people are adding nutmeg to everything they can think of; the yarn stores are entering their busy season. School has started for some people, and for us it starts on Wednesday. I, like many, love the back to school feelings – unblemished school supplies and joyful reunions, the bittersweet knowledge that the end of hot days means that snow and cold are coming.

I have written only a handful of words over the summer. I booked a trip to Ireland. I went swimming with my kids. It was a summer of hard things and lovely things, days spent in the sun with people I cherish and days where everyone cried. I got a narwhal tattoo, went to work, and went to counselling. Summer camp, swimming lessons, a drive to BC. Many of my far-flung friends came to visit me, and I treasure those times.

Time is a spiral, in some ways. Moving forward, always changing, and always circling back to echoes of the way things were before. Never the same, only similar. This fall, all three kids are in the same school. I’ll have my mornings to write again. It will be the same, but different. I am heading towards the final revisions of my novel-in-progress, and hope to query it in 2019. I have plans for sewing and knitting. I’ve taken up sourdough bread, and it’s a glorious thing for fall.

I read like a fiend this summer – all the Sam Vimes books by Terry Pratchett, which I still cherish; Whichwood, the sequel to Furthermore by Tahereh Mafi; Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda and Leah on the Offbeat, by Becky Albertalli; Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, read out loud to my daughter; and The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. All of them were fantastic.

September first. Another kind of new year’s day. Here I go again.