My Bitching Season

This is usually my season of bitching.

It starts the minute the thermometer begins to regularly dip below 65. It has been raining a lot here, so the bitching started earlier than usual.

“You’re cold? Why?” my husband asks.

What do you mean, why? I just am.

He’s never cold. He has Pioneer blood. Me, I have “Mix me up another Mojito out by the 98 degree pool”’ blood.

And yet, I welcome the Fall. It is beautiful here. You can see evidence of the glory that is a Tennessee fall if you click over to the posts page and watch the short photo slide of what sits outside my windows.

On Sunday, I spent a few hours on a lawn chair set next to my friend’s creek. We basked in the sunshine, drank tea and chatted while the water “talked to itself,” as Laura Ingalls Wilder likes to say about flowing creeks. It was nourishing and a full-on reminder of why I love my Boonies.

And because I am old enough to recognize the patterns in my life, I realized a few years ago that good things tend to happen to me in the Fall. I had my kid, for one. And many others that would just bore you. I am waiting for this year’s extra good thing. (I hope it entails the loss of a few pounds.)

As I write this, it is golden outside again. It is in the 60s, which I can manage without one complaint. But, I am inside. Answering e-mails, getting ready for a work phone call, checking orders, putting off laundry, putting off sitting down to write my day’s worth of words for NaNoWriMo. I need to get outside in this because soon, no amount of fleece will make me go out there unless I have to.

While the bitching goes on in my head, I battle it with thoughts of good things that Fall usually brings, and something so wise and fabulous my acupuncturist told me one dark October day years and years and years ago.

“Nature is getting ready to rest. We are a part of nature, so now, we must rest.”

That sage advice has carried me through dark winters for a long time. It has allowed me to say no to extra work and holiday social invitations, to focus inward and keep my spiritual and physical hearth stoked.

But, today as I think about the darkness and cold that awaits, I am wishing I could spend winter days resting at an unseasonably warm, sunny beach. Mojito in hand.

Even if it is so damned pretty out there right now.