Change, sometimes, is good.

Next weekend, we plan to close the pool.

It's bittersweet.  It's been the Summer Made of Awesome.  Parties, quiet outdoor dinners, practicing dives, sunning arms, and paddling with Johnny.  It's all been magical.

But the weather is getting crisp and my internal clock says it's time to shut 'er down.   Time to move on.  Time for something different.  We've been getting cozy with our basement, and the new tv therein.  We've watched more movies in the last two weeks than we have in the last six months.  I'm fantasizing about making the perfect man cave.  I guess that means it's fall.  And I am ready.

Often, usually in the winter as he scrapes a foot of snow off of his car, my husband rhetorically asks WHY WE STILL LIVE IN KANSAS.

This is why.  The crackle of the first cool night, the first sun of May on your shoulders, the beauty of the first silent snowfall of the year.

Yes, eventually it all gets old.  It's too hot for too long.  It's too snowy and wet.  The cars are dirty and the leaves have to be raked - again.  So sometimes Kansas is hard.  But it is worth it for the first weeks of each season when you start thinking of a new kind of cooking, planning a different kind of party, putting on clothes that have been in storage for half the year.  Before you're tired of sweaters and coats, before you're out of firewood and too tired to cut more, before your skin is chapped from bracing wind, the season change is so lovely, I could cry.

Changing seasons bring different smells, they evoke childhood memories, and bring with them plans and inspiration.  This year, for us, fall means walking into our back yard sans sunscreen to play in the yard with toys instead of in the pool.  It means, hearing the KU marching band practicing in a nearby field.  It means soups and pastas and hot dinners and a friend or two and a bottle of Chianti.

Lovely Lawrence, Kansas.  As my neighbor said today, "Even an ordinary weekend in Lawrence is extraordinary."  Here's to an extraordinary Lawrence fall.