Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Goodbye Summer

Gone are these lazy summer days of River being eine Hausfrau. Gone, I say! These are the days of waking up extremely early to commute ever so slowly to Big Girl School (AKA WSU) where parking is ridiculous and classes are loooong. Away we go! Armed only with our laptop, our statistics text and our sheer will to resist the overwhelming urge to skip class to paint the garage, pick pumpkins, and plan our engagement party.

Life has been so good to us this summer. Our house, yard and garden have become our retreat, our sactuary, our fortress against "the real world", that is to say, all of the facts, such as the fact that my fiance hasn't had a single day off from work in about a month, the fact that I have really complex classes starting fall quarter on a campus which my female brain (sans decent spatial reasoning skills) as of yet seems incapable of navigating, the fact that somewhere amidst this busy chaos we have a formal, intimate wedding to plan. These facts loom. Yet the warm breeze of the coolest summer on record still insists that global warming is by far the hugest hoax in history, and it makes me happy. Our big, cool house and its big cool rooms make us happy. I take solace in still another fact, not the looming kind, but instead, one of the reassuring variety: after an impossibly long and stressful day I will arrive home, here, to my own house, still collapse with a sigh into a warm bed in a beautiful room, and when I wake, this summer will be all but over, and I'll have the first fall of leaf-lined streets in my new neighborhood to look forward to.

Perhaps I am too optimistic, but I am compelled by everything that has ever happened to me to believe fervently in a benevolent universe, one in which mostly good things happen. And lately, mostly good things happen to me.