PS, I Love You

Ter loves the fall so much that if she was a Spice Girl, she’d be Pumpkin Spice.

Me, I like pumpkin pie, pumpkin soup, pumpkin custard, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin quick bread (GF, ovvvvv course), and the word itself. If I had a Mini, it would be Flyer orange with a vanity plate reading “PUMKIN”. As for the perennial autumn favourite, ye olde pumpkin spice latte/chai/what-have-you, I confess, it’s not the spice so much as its heralding of the season that brightens my world. Whether I order one or not, and it’s generally not, I’m always happy to welcome it when it comes.

So how was it that I opened my email on August 27 to find advisories from two of my regular coffee haunts proclaiming the return of the pumpkin spice latte? Make no mistake. I wanted the end of Summer 2018 more desperately than anyone, but even then, August 27??? Really, you money-grubbing corporate giants? You couldn’t wait for the Labour Day weekend before launching the harvest on a society still preparing for back to school? Even Mother Nature was in denial about the timing: who wants a warming spice drink when the park bench is hot beneath your butt and you’re still working on your tan? Surely pumpkin spice can wait until the first day of autumn!

And that’s (kind of) my point. The last day of summer, for me, falls not on the equinox in September, but on August 31. It doesn’t even matter if Labour Day happens after my birthday; September 1 is the first day of fall.

It happens almost overnight. Mornings dawn later, cool and crisp, yet the jacket you must wear to work is flung over your arm on the way home. The sky is a vibrant, burnished blue. The sun casts golden light on trees suddenly ablaze with colour. Twilight settles sooner, but gently, accompanied by the first whiff of wood smoke from neighbourhood chimneys. Apples scent the air where no apple trees exist – figure that one out! – and suddenly it’s too cold for your sandals. By the time the equinox arrives around the 22nd, we’re well into the autumnal groove ... but that groove does not, must not, begin until after August 31.

Happy Birthday to Ru!

Ru at 52

Finally! My birthday is a statutory holiday! Of course it should be so every year, but once every 5 or 6 is better than never, and it makes up for the occasions in childhood when it landed on the first day of school. 

Birthdays don’t mean the same to me as they once did. As a kid, they were all about cake and prezzies. In my 20s, they were more about parties than prezzies. In my 30s, they were more about prezzies than parties. In my 40s, prezzies began to lose their power and the parties got way smaller. Now that I’m officially in my 50s, the parties are lunch with my parents and I only think about prezzies to placate the people who want to gift me despite my insistence that I haven’t thought about them. I’m lucky. I have more than I need and all I could want … except for that restored ’66 Mustang, of course. 

Along with a quieter celebration of what my dear friend, Treena, terms “Ruthie Appreciation Day”, I’ve come to view my natal date as my own personal New Year’s Day. Rather than wreck my winter holidays with short-lived resolutions on January 1, I use September 2 as a gauge to determine where I am against where I was and where I want to be. If I’m off the mark, it’s time to readjust. Compared to where I was twelve months ago, today I’m in pretty good shape and the future is lookin’ gooood. 

If life hands you no more than you can handle, I must be pretty fragile because I haven’t had to handle very much. Or maybe it’s just that the love of my family – which includes a friend so treasured that my parents call her “the adopted one” – has freed me to focus on whatever struggle has engaged me at the time. Childhood was easy. My teens were uglier than was fair because I had the bones to manage as well as stupid hormones and the horrors of high school. My twenties were more fun and educational than school certainly was. I got my mid-life crisis out of the way at 30 and spent the next ten or fifteen years writing more stories than I had produced in all the years preceding. I am now a bit past the halfway point since I’m unsure that I want to live to be 104, so I guess I’m experiencing a pair of late summers: that of the current year, and that of my present existence. 

My fifty-second year has dawned serene and peaceful. I recognize my good fortune and hope it will continue as I work on my present challenge of “letting go”. I have a terrible time believing (incorrectly) that I have to fix everything, that everyone has to be settled before I can relax, and that my happiness relies on the happiness of those whom I love. Make no mistake: I love more deeply and more loyally than I appear – my favourite Virgoan trait is the assumption that people know I love them so I don’t have to say it aloud. Fussing is not in my nature. It’s not to be confused with fretting, either. Fretting, I do, and very well, thank you. But I’m working on letting that go, as well. I can do so much more for the people I love if I’m at peace, myself. 

These aren’t resolutions. I am a work in progress, so every day is another step along the path to wherever I’m going. I don’t give much thought to the destination these days – I reckon I’ll get there whether I anticipate every move or not. I’m learning that life happens in the moment, not in the future, and whatever my purpose was when I set out in 1961 will find me rather than me having to find it. 

Today Ter and I are going out to peruse the produce at the farm stands in the rural part of the world. We’ll do lunch and drive back along the twisty-turny backroads where the trees are at their nearest to the road – I’m taking the camera to snap some pics of the late summer foliage. It’ll be a fun day. The perfect birthday, really. 

I have always loved September.