Tonight I rediscovered a woman I went to graduate school with.  We were in her home for an Obama phone bank.  I remember her wedding.  She's still married to the guy she married that day.  It's amazing how much older we all are, and also how much she seems like she was then - efficient, effective, outgoing, together, upbeat.    She has a lovely home with a beautiful pond full of fish out back.  She remembers me too.  I wonder if I seem as natural extension of the young woman in her memory as she seems of the young woman in mine.

Long work day. Good work day.  It is still mild for the end of August.  Last year was so hot and the wildfires out toward Bastrop were about to start burning.  Now the forrest they burned is beginning to come back.  Not the houses.  I'm thinkng about what comes back and what doesn't. what is destroyed for good and what can't be.  I'd like to think human  relationships can always be restored, but experience shows me that too often they are not. Health cannot always be restored.  Nor youth. Trust can be restored but it takes both work and willingness to accept the change created by the work. Order can be restored almost always.  Peace of mind can be restored.

I've missed a day, and that's alright, just don't want to miss too many, want to build the pattern back.  Yesterday morning, in preparation for the High holy Days, Liam and Ruth marched into my bedroom blowing trumpet and shofar to wake me from any late summer drowsiness.  I love this tradition of thinking about becoming more awake each year as the seasons turn.  What do I want to be more awake to this season?  Mostly kindness, and patience in myself - calm in face of deadlines and schedules - more tenderness to those with whom I live and less need for reassurance..

One more day and I want to post here again, though I don't have great things to post.  Only habit builds habit, and I want , as I wrote last night, to restore this blog, not to lose it.  I can write tonight that we have had rain two days in a row and the temperature probably won't reach 100 this week.  Maybe it won't get that hot again this year.  Or maybe it will.  there is definitely a sense of summer ending.  School starts here in a week and the teachers are already back.  All of my grandchildren have school supplies and most of their school clothes.  Liam and Drea are both going to preschool this year, first time for him and starting up again after summer break for her.  Both seem excited.  I bought several fun little school dresses for Drea at Savers, my favorite second hand store, and Liam chose himself several plaid shord sleeved button front shirts at the same store.  That style seems to be his trademark. He dresses like his Daddy, which makes for some great pictures both mental and photographic.  Life is good in our house tonight.  Ruth is working on photographs she took at a bridal shoot today (not a wedding but just phtos of the bride)  This is especially cool because the bride was one of Chris' students his first year teaching in the high school in Jourdonton, a small town south of San Antonio.  She kept up with Chris, and now is teaching in Round Rock, just north of here, and about to marry.  Continuity like that feels good to me.  Bob is out at the kitchen table printing out English language materials for the refugee program wiht which he volunteers.  Liam is sleeping and Chris is reading.  This time next week KK will be back in her little house, probably NOT sleeping since school will start the next day.   

Rabbi Monty made a call for poems to share at high holiday services, which got me reading through this blog looking for, and finding a few, poems.  I've been letting this blog languish, but I don't want to let it die.  Reading back to when I started it in 2005 feels good.  I want there to still be words here seven years from now.   I  want to be alive then, but who know.  I want to be writing as long as I'm alive.  It is storming out - a good thing in the summer.  Summer is almost over.  next week this timekk will be back to start her sophomore year.  Today has been odd, off kilter, maybe because of the storms.  We saw a bad accident on the road in an earlier rain storm.  A donut truck hit a biciclyst and firetrucks came to the rescue.  It was scary to see.  I hope the cyclist lived.  We were on the way to swim with Liam in Annalyn's indoor pool.  It was so amazing to watch him really swim, put his head willingly under the water again and again, kick, and reach and pull with his arms.  That part of the day was not unsettled, just very happy.