Changes

As Summer slowly gives way to Autumn and the school buses arrive to take our children off to school, I can't help but to contemplate other changes in our lives. Changes that mark beginnings, ends, and new directions.

When you think about it, life is one continual path of change. Take, for instance, the phenomenal amount of changes that a baby endures in their first few months of life. They come into this world a wriggling, squalling little bundle, often with misshapen heads and strangely-colored skin from the trauma of being born and in those first months, their heads shift into more normal forms, they lose the newborn look, plump up on mother's milk - and start to teethe. Not to mention the rate of growth. It always astonishes me to contemplate how much children grow in their first years of life and that's just physically. What about emotionally? Intellectually? Do we really understand how wondrous it is that they go from drooling, incoherent gurglings to full-on speech in a two-year time period? And that, by the age of five, they are already in the mainstream of academia, filling their brains with all of these facts and figures that they couldn't possibly use in their lifetime.

Change is everywhere. Right outside my window, the leaves on the trees are starting to turn into an autumnal feast that tourists travel great distances to see - but all I have to do is open my curtains. By mid-October, all of the trees will look like they have been lit on fire for a brief, beautiful time before those leaves are set free on the wind, the trees stand stark against a gray sky, and the snow begins to blanket the earth in a frigid comforter. Ah, more change.

And then there are the changes that are more personal. Your oldest child going off to college. Your niece giving birth to her second child. Your sister celebrating a milestone birthday. Life is change. What changes are you facing as we enter the first week of Autumn? Please share, I'd love to hear your stories. ~ Margay