The summer has flown by, if only because it’s been so sliced and diced by scheduled and unscheduled activity that reveling in any given moment seemed hopeless. The moments of stillness were few, it seemed: watching hummingbirds dart about at the UC Santa Cruz arboretum; sitting on my parents’ porch in Plattsburgh. The rest was all doing or waiting to do, with eyes focused on a goal and not the moment.

Already, the preparations for fall are beginning. Paula has a new teaching job to prepare for (she recently was hired as a middle school english teacher at a nearby Catholic school), plus she’s been driving to N.E. Pa frequently to help her mother move out of her ramshackle house into an elders’ apartment. Kevin has his counselor-in-training duties at Camp Bravo, and in a week starts a prep class in the morning at the high school he’ll be going to this year.

And there’s work.

So I’m catching any lingering moments I can, trying to just be every now and then. But the to-do list keeps getting longer, so I’ll have to find a way to be and do at the same time.