The Summer of My Life

This afternoon I sat on the porch and watched the leaves fall off our maple tree. I basked in the crisp sunshine that warmed my face and took a deep breath of that smell.. the fall smell…and I felt joy rising inside my heart. I sat with my face to the sun and just drank it in, feeling how good it was to be alive.

My moment of contemplation was penetrated by three happy voices coming from the garden. I looked over and saw two children with enormous shovels trying to dig up the last of this years carrot harvest, and a baby without shoes eating old green tomatoes off the vine.

I laughed and realized that my life is never dull. Even in the moments when I try to slow down there is always work to be done, always someone, always something.

As I sat there and watched the leaves fall on the heads of my happy carrot diggers, it struck me that if my whole life were broken up into four seasons, that right now would be the summer of my life.

The hot, messy, busy, wild days of summer.

Summer is a time for playing, for discovering, and for spending time together. A time for  cultivating, weeding, pruning, shaping. It is a time for investing hard work into the things you cherish and want to grow…. and I am growing a family.

A beautiful, beautiful family.

And even though sometimes the heat of this season of my life can be unbearable and the work exhausting. It really is so much fun.  Right now I am my children’s best friend and every day they take me along on their adventures. Even on the days when I’d rather be left behind, they carry me along and show me the world through their eyes. A world where everything  and anything is possible.

Yet watching the leaves fall reminded me that it won’t always be like this. That sometime, in the coming- much-too-quickly- future, my season of life will change. That the hard work and
play of summer will come to a close,  and it will be Fall,  the season of harvest. A time when my seeds will have all been sown, my plants will have grown and my work will change. I imagine that  this season–the fall of my life– will also be a richly rewarding; a time of harvesting, preserving, gathering, and preparing for the future. I am sure it will be just as busy, but in a different way, and it is something I look forward to.

But for right now, my day of harvest is still a ways down the road. I am in the thick of the long summer days. Though, every once in awhile, I get a glimpse of blossoms and buds beginning to bloom in these little souls, and there is nothing more beautiful.