Schooltime rituals
While I’m reluctant to admit it, summer is drawing to a close. Even if the next season promises all its unique delights—warm baked goods, the impending holidays, the changing leaves—it’s still hard to leave what was behind. Especially summer, with all its freedoms, its laity, its time to just be. Now we turn the calendar pages and ready ourselves for the things to come, not the least of which, for many, is school.
Even though those particular years are over in our house—at least, maybe over until my daughter gets into graduate school—I still remember them so clearly. School-supply shopping was the defining ritual of August, or earlier, if the list was available. We’d get an email from the school with an outline of the necessities: always paper and pencils, folders and notebooks. In elementary school, scissors, glue, crayons, colored paper. In middle, more composition books. In high school, more binders, planners, a protractor, a compass. We’d head to the Target in Ellicott City, ready to pick up the tools of an education to come, and ready to curate a tasteful palette of folders and notebooks to suit whatever my daughter’s current taste was. In the early years, those folders with pictures of puppies and bunnies were highly coveted—by high school and college, mostly crisp black and white tools, and a boatload of red pens for editing her essays and short stories and physics homework.
The minutiae changed, but the ritual remained, in essence, the same. We were embarking, in that moment, together, on the next chapter of growth—the class schedules and prospective teachers already swirling in the mind, the upcoming school plays rich with possibility, excitement. After a summer of good rest and recovery, this season inspired new, exciting energy. We were ready to face those coming months, hectic as they no doubt would always be. With our carefully selected tools of the trade—with some fun erasers thrown in as a treat—there was no goal too outstanding, no challenge too great.
I think there are a lot of rituals in our lives associated with this particular seasonal juncture. Fall is a time of return—summer sends us boldly into the world, into pools and parks, and fall turns down the thermostat a little and encourages us to come back, stay a while, focus our growing attention on our immediate circumstances, ourselves, our families, our homes. When we find ourselves tilting back towards orange leaves and shorter days, we’re more and more called back to the usual routines of our lives, often laid aside for these vacation-filled summer months. And after all the wild fun, there is something inherently comfortable about finding that our routines, our ways of being, are still there, ready for us to circle back. Each season gives us something to carry to the next one. Summer, for me, inspires a pleasantly worn-out return to medians—the kind of satisfying homecoming you feel after a day at the pool, or a long walk.
When we start to turn our minds back towards our homes, we find ourselves at the perfect juncture to really consider our spaces and the way we live in it. It’s important that the place you’re coming back to—the place you’ll be spending more and more time in, as the weather starts to sneak towards the distant winter—is a place where you can ease into yourself, feel totally embraced and accepted. This means curating a home that speaks to you—a home that, really, is you.
Woodside Home would love to make that happen. If you’re ready to take your space to the next level of authenticity, drop me a line. I’m here to talk.
So, this year, no new school supplies—no trip to Target to peruse the aisles of graphing calculators and three-ring binders. But I think I’ll still celebrate the turn of the season with a little home ritual of our own: thinking about our fall planters. I hope you have a lovely tail-end of your summer!