Sunday Afternoon Tea - Hitting the Home Key

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The turn of the calendar brought with it cool breezes coming through the window as I washed the breakfast dishes.  I've been waiting for this day all summer long.  This cool down is temporary as heat returns on Labor day.  However, the calendar now shows the month of September so we are close to that which my heart longs.

I adore the Autumn months, so much that to me they are the true beginning of the Holiday season.  Especially those weeks when there is color everywhere I look and the forest shows off all her finery.  There is a great deal to look forward to in the coming weeks, once summer has let go of its' warmth for this year.

There is something about September that brings my thoughts back to home.  One may travel in the heat of the summer, to the lake or the sea or even perhaps a river flowing with the promise of tonight's meal.  It seems that just about everyone I know goes somewhere in the summer months.

Not so much once school begins, unless it is going somewhere to view the "color".  The cooler weather returns my thoughts to my kitchen as once again soup simmers on the stove and bread is baked in the oven and a throw is needed over my shoulders as I open the pages of a novel.

My preferred rereading changes with the cooler weather as I reach for a couple Gladys Taber books to leave on the coffee table and perhaps a Mitford novel that allows me to travel to a place I'd love to live with people who would make the most delightful... albeit interesting... neighbors.

It is a little early to purchase a rust colored mum for the porch if I want it to last through true Autumn.  While the calendar says September, the weather forecast brings us heat indexes well into the 90s.  There will be time for mums and pumpkins and Indian corn and the taking down of the box labeled "Fall Decorations" from the shelf where it has resided since tucking it away when the Christmas boxes came out.

This time of year held a bit of melancholia for my mother and the more years I have in the rear view window, the more my mother's melancholia slips in to my thinking.  I'm not sure why... perhaps it is the end of the season of growth... perhaps it is the falling leaves in the forest... we who have lived through many an end of summer know winter is on the way.

Even given that, we are on the cusp of my very favorite season.  One that brings such delights as pumpkin spice lattes (no, I haven't had one, yet) and the return of cinnamon and nutmeg and pumpkin and hot apple cider and apples and acorn squash and butternut squash and the other flavors best known during this time of the year.

The beginning of September always seems to cause me to come home in my thoughts.  It reminds me of when I had a laptop computer and the Home key was located in a place on the keyboard where I would occasionally hit it by accident.  Suddenly my typing was back at the beginning of whatever was being written.  I had hit Home quite by accident.

September is the calendar equivalent of the Home key in the days and weeks and months of my life.  Perhaps it is simply that the school year would always begin the day after Labor Day.  In my teen years, I couldn't wait until the September Back to School issue of Seventeen magazine could be found on the newsstands.  September was when we would get new clothes and new shoes and a brand new box of Crayola crayons.

These are but a few of many embedded memories that bring a sense of... coming back and coming home... thoughts of beginnings.

I may this week... regardless of what the thermostat says outside... pull a Taber book off the shelf, fill one of my red plaid Thermos containers with hot apple cider, play the George Strait CD in the van (for Country was the genre of music played at home), and find a cool spot under a tree to read and ponder and remember.

Remembering only the good stuff of home, family, dear friends, and how far God has brought us in His mercy and His grace.  Until that day He calls me... Home.  Maranatha.