Between Notes

August is awkward.

It’s as hot as ever, but the kids are back at school. Swimsuits and shorts are giving way to backpacks and books. Here in Colorado, the dry heat is now gently bookended by crisp evenings and cool mornings as the first Montana winds flow across the Front Range. All over the South, the diesel roar of school buses mingles with the chorus of cicadas and the hiss of sprinklers soaking dew-drenched lawns. August carries that perennial childhood ache of knowing something is ending before you are ready to let it go: the dream of an endless summer suddenly jolted awake by the school bell.

As I write, our girls are upstairs packing and preparing to leave—one returning to university, the other gathering up the remnants of her childhood to move into her first big-girl apartment, this time for good. Tonight will be the last night the five of us share the same permanent home. For 22 years, this has been our normal. Tomorrow, it won’t be. And I’m not ready.

We are in that strange terrain of transition, between arriving and departing, beginnings and endings, holding on and letting go. Life is in flux. Nothing feels settled; like living between notes.

Perhaps that’s why August feels so achingly familiar. So much of life is lived in this liminal space, a threshold between what was and what is yet to be. Whether we like it or not, life is always moving, always shifting, always passing through. What arises eventually falls. What feels solid is quietly slipping away.

And when the ground beneath us keeps shifting, we naturally look for somewhere solid to stand. So we cling ever more tightly to our kids, we brace against change, we stiffen, we harden, we refuse to let go of what is already passing through. We hold onto what is familiar—the full house, the ordinary routines, the carpool line, the math homework, the noise upstairs, the knowledge that everyone will be home tonight—even as it slips away. We get angry that a chapter is ending, and grieve that it all seems to have happened so fast. I almost feel betrayed by the ending of a chapter I never wanted to close.