Squeaky New Shoes Flashback, Comin’ Atcha

I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and number.

And if I had a lot more money and an electric pencil sharpener. Have you ever sent anyone a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils? This should definitely happen in my life at some point – maybe a teacher I want to thank…but there are so many.

On Tuesday we met my children’s new teachers and put their supplies in their desk and added our tissues and disinfectant wipes to the pile. It’s been well over ninety degrees around here lately, and you’ll notice I haven’t written a single crisp-and-crackly blog post about how I can feel change and the beginning of new things in the air and just around the corner. And that is because I can’t feel anything but the heat and oh-dear-god-the-humidity, especially since the A/C on my car just looks at me and rolls her eyes like, Are you kidding me? It’s August in Missouri. The humidity is serial. No one can help you now.

But as we pulled out of our drive to go to the school buildings, and I KID YOU NOT, leaves fell from the tree beside our house. They’re all yellow and dead-looking, and they fell. And from one building to the next, a breeze picked up that actually made me shiver, and suddenly it was fall. This from the person who invents magic into the mundaniest of moments: That was the most poetical thing I’ve ever seen.

So now I’m all set. Bring on the sharpened pencils. Bring on the mountains of take-home notes and permission slips and Scholastic book orders – especially those! After I tucked the boys into bed Tuesday night, three Mizzou Tiger shirts laid carefully over three pairs of pants on the carpet, I opened their shoe boxes to make sure each shoe was laced, and then I just breathed in that happy new shoe smell. Seriously, bring it on.