Keep Calm and Welcome September

Surprise!  It's September!

For me, the month of September has always seemed like it was the beginning of a new year.  School always used to start the day after Labor Day and Labor Day was always the first Monday of September.   Maybe that's when things started to go so awry.  And so, imagine my surprise, when I awoke this morning and it was September.

How did that happen?  Wasn't it just March 17 yesterday?  You remember, don't you?  That's when they started shutting everything down in the United States.  No Saint Patrick's Day celebrations.  No saluting the harbingers of spring.  And then it was April with a subdued resurrection of Jesus, followed by May with Mother celebrated from afar with few hugs and kisses.  Graduations were virtual online affairs with some automotive drive-by processionals to pick up diplomas.  Brides kept their wedding dresses in the closet covered in plastic in June waiting for the day when their big day might happen.  

It just kept happened...or not happening...all the normal markers of a year passing.  Baseball didn't begin until August in a Florida bubble.  Other sports finished up what they had postponed from March.  There is a new definition for March Madness.   July and August passed unremarkably, each day seeming like the one before as we were at first ordered, then strongly advised we were safer at home.

In order March gave way to an April that blended with May and scarcely noticed transition to June and July and August.   The world became even more dystopian with the uprising of protests in the streets of most major cites in response to yet another inconceivable and unjustifiable death of a black person.  The weather went mad with hurricanes and extreme heat warnings, floods, earthquakes and more.   And yet it still feels like March 17 was just yesterday.

And so,  yes,  it is September.  Keep calm.  

When the new month was at hand, II was hoping I would be inspired, nay, motivated, to begin again.  This blog has been quiet.  I've lived on and through Facebook while not seeing or visiting or sharing hugs with friends and loved ones.  Wearing a mask wherever I go.  That still feels so very "after the end of the world as we know it".   

So that is why I am here.  I am floundering, flaying, grasping at straws for some sort of normalcy again.  But I am reminded that this is our new normal.  Some may tweet incendiary thoughts out and let them fall on whomever they may.  I prefer to just share my thoughts and musings...for what they are worth...and this, the first day of September.

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