It's Just Different, Somehow

Once again the earth has rolled around the sun till it's back in September - the Birthday Month. The Cricket Song Month.  The New Beginning Month.

But somehow, this year, it's different.

In fact, the whole summer was different. It feels as if it's been different for a long time. I've been trying to figure out how long it's been different and I think it's been more than a year really - but certainly it's been different since the warm weather began.

First off there is the drying up of my creativity. The lack of art, craft, and creation has been a little painful and a little relaxing. With the retirement of The Doing and The Making has come The Reading - but it hasn't been productive reading. Not the Good For You stuff. It's been escape reading into murder mystery novels - a harmless enough activity, I suppose, but certainly not particularly creative. And even that has been different this time around. BD and I are both reading the same author, Michael Connelly and discussing his books - their underlying ethics, the particular characters, and most especially the literary style and skill he uses. Hmmm. Well. Perhaps that part is the productive bit. We never read the same books unless we're reading out loud to each other. This is a first for us and it's author specific. We've tried to branch out to a few other authors and haven't gotten past chapter 1 with any of them.

I am not horribly unhappy about this inartistic un-productiveness. I know that creativity sometimes needs to sleep, to store up energy. Besides, I don't create out of duty. I do it out of joy and love. But it does feel strange to be so in-artistically unproductive. It just, somehow, feels different.

There is also the unease I've felt over the whole shake-up in our local government. It isn't panic. It's almost anxiety, but not quite. The changes were long overdue and they'll make things much better - they even satisfy my Virgo soul, with it's love of order, routine and stability. But there will be some fall-out and the library will have to revisit a lot of its statistical data in light of Someone Else's now-revealed inadequacy. It's always a pain when you have to clean up somebody else's mess - even if it's only a part of someone else's mess.

So yeah - work feels different. And I made it feel really different by pushing through a software platform change from a pretty intuitive, easy, almost childlike program to a more geeky and sophisticated and, I still believe, better program. That sort of change is always a climb up the hill - a hill that feels steeper, the older the climber is and I'm sorry to say - I am the youngest employee at the library right now. Yeah. Gonna be 61 years young.

So yeah. It feels different.

And then there is the different feeling in the house right now. I am so sad to say that our beloved Captain Jack Haile, our good health talisman dog, slunk away in the night last week and was hit up on the highway - the 4 mile away highway. I found him as I was driving to work and we buried him beside Topsy. I will write a loving tribute to him one day soon. He was too fine a dog, to special a dog, to wonderful a dog to not memorialize him, but right now the pain is too sharp to write about it.

Poor little Callie is very disoriented - when she is reminded of it, that is. She is a dog and as such she lives in the now. A run. A biscuit. A romp with the string toy is always going to get her attention but the rest of the time she's hugging close to our ankles. The thought of her being canine companion-less bothers me a lot and BD a good bit as well. I think we will find her a playmate pretty soon.

And so.

And so now, as the days begin to shorten, as the mornings fill with misty dew, as the crickets begin to sing and the black gums begin to revolve from green to red, I begin the Birthday Month feeling, somehow, a little different. Not necessarily bad. But surely different.