There’s comfort in the regularity of seasons. Today, this first day of September, rain has come like a welcome visitor. The willow lifts its arms in greeting. It’s not a summer rain with high roiling thunderheads and stunning lightning, rather this is a fall rain – although technically we’re still in summer. The pearlescent gray-silk overcast and the cool drifting wind tells another season.

I open my window to soft sounds: rain, muted traffic noise, absent sirens.

Regardless of the rancor of our long, hot summer, it’s ending. Fall unpacks its valise.

To have a reminder of the seasons may be our most saving grace these days. For now, the world really does keep turning and tipping and the seasons come and go. Whether we’re in climate change, political change, economic change, or culture change, the seasons come and go.

But but but….!!! you may say. Yes. The seasonal weather will be different from what it was in the past, as will the political weather, and certainly the economic weather! All that is true. But the world, for now, will keep turning. 

Trusting the seasonal changes as I grew up helped me learn to trust the seasons of my life. On our Kansas farm, regardless of the trials we passed through in the previous season, every four months we got a new beginning. The first week of September, fall appeared; in the first weeks of December, winter arrived; in early March, the wind smelled different – spring; and in the first weeks of June, summer. That’s how it seems to work in the high plains.

Not that the old season wouldn’t creep back in for another shot; it often did. Rather, we learned to recognize promise.

I’ve been pretty quiet the past couple of weeks. Not much writing. I’ve read. Without remembering what I was waiting for, this is it: the gentle hint of something new. The seasons will change.

My responsibility is to notice.