déjà autumn

This is BITNF’s 200th post!

Hurricane Lee closed out a summer of challenging weather in Nova Scotia, making landfall on the 16th as a big lumbering post-tropical storm. The high winds didn’t seem any less when I went to bed compared to when I got up that morning. The storm impacted ~280K NS households with power outages but was not nearly as destructive here as the other two post-tropical storms I’ve experienced since moving back: Fiona (2022) and Dorian (2019).  Planning for a hurricane every September is part of life now.

It was the summer of it is what it is. I fit in some fun, sure, but was motivated being busy getting stuff done.  Some of that was stuff I’d procrastinated on for years.  Finding the right folk to take the last bits of old furniture, like my mother’s antique secretary desk.  Moving vintage odds and ends, like my old prom dresses, into the right hands.  Sorting through old papers and saying goodbye to all the printed pages of the adolescent novel I wrote in my 20’s. 

Like last year at this time, I’m getting ready for a road trip to a meditation retreat in Batavia, NY in early October. I’ll visit with family in Ontario along the way, pick up a friend also going to the retreat, and officially become a year older.  Last year’s trip seems so clear in my mind that it doesn’t feel like a whole year could possibly have gone by.  Wasn’t it just the other day I was parking the little blue car in downtown Riviere-du-Loup to pop into Café Brulere to pick up a coffee for the morning drive? The pandemic time warp is over and the years are speeding up for me again. 

I’m really looking forward to the trip.  All of it.  The drive.  The autumn foliage.  Visiting family. A retreat in a beautiful location with the Sangha I’ve joined online almost daily for over three years. Stopping at now-familiar hotels and cafés (this will be my fourth solo road trip on the same route). 

I’ll try not to be too OC about doing an exact repeat of last year’s itinerary. I’ve already changed up my first overnight destination for the return trip—last year I was exhausted by the end of the drive that day not because of the distance but because of the heavy TO-area traffic. And I’ll try to remind myself not to take any of the trip for granted.  Maybe my favoUrite café in Drummondville will close.  Maybe I’ll decide to go somewhere else next year to celebrate my 60^th birthday.  Maybe the retreat won’t be offered in Batavia again. 

This may sound strange but I’m also looking forward to birthday #59.  I have big plans for what I want to accomplish before my 60^th birthday (it doesn’t really have anything to do with age, the birthday is just a convenient year-from-now marker). But I am also starting to think of how my 60’s might look, my aspirations for that decade. Not so much what I want to do (no bucket list here), as how I want to be. I’ll have lots of time to noodle on that during the road trip.

Wishing you a peaceful fall season!

References and related links:

• Sangha: A Buddhist community.
• OC: obsessive-compulsive.
• seize the season (post #197)
• autumn’s kick off (post #184)