I’m wearing my brown riding boots with a pair of jeans. My hair is down around my brown leather jacket and cream and mustard scarf. I walk outside and head to my car. I pause like I always do because the air is crisp. I look around at the beauty around me. I can see the white house across the way with its big trees in the front yard. Its trees and the ones in my yard are speckled with yellow and brown hues but they are still mostly green.
The Chicago wind blows my hair up around my face. The leaves blow up past my face, and I take another deep breath. It smells like a time long since past. It’s like walking into a time forgotten. The air is so fresh and clean. It smells of outdoors and of smoke from camp fires the night before or chimneys that day. Everything seems to move slower. I take it all in one last time, and I walk to my car.
I crank the car, and my favorite country station begins to play. The song is about the end of summer and the sadness in that. To me it’s a joy. Summer has come and gone, and fall is here. The world is changing; everyone is beginning to relax and prepare for the cool of winter. I crack the windows and pull out of my driveway – I’m headed nowhere.
But that isn’t reality.
Summer is beginning to head out the door like a hot bear, but it isn’t getting colder. It’s getting hotter, and it will continue to. I’m not even in Illinois. I’m in Mozambique living in a village. The wind is blowing in from the South bringing heat and drought to an already parched land. The cool of the morning that brings relief to the heat is still hot. There is no escaping it. The flowers are still in bloom, but there is no such thing as a chrysanthemum here. Welcome to September in Africa.
I love it here. It is beautiful and relaxing. I wouldn’t trade being here for the world – it is such a gift from God that He called me on this journey which brought me to this place. But knowing all of that doesn’t make it easier to live without those things you love so much.
Fall is my favorite time of year.
Fall brings joy and happiness and togetherness. People begin to fall into patterns that enable them to be together and to love one another. Fall brings beauty even as things are dying. It brings football and my favorite flowers. It brings apples and pumpkin patches and a new sense of light to people’s lives. Fall is my favorite time of year, and I will miss it this year.
The World Race means leaving home and abandoning much of what you have. It means learning to grieve the losses you experience from leaving for a year. But the losses we grieve aren’t always tangible things. Some people miss weddings. We all miss birthdays and holidays. But the losses that are hardest to grieve are the ones that aren’t tangible. The ones you didn’t expect to feel. The ones like missing your favorite season. I will miss out on all the things of fall this year, and that is sad.
We all experience losses in life. Some of them are small, and others are big. Regardless of their magnitude, it is still very important to grieve.
If we don’t grieve, we won’t let the losses go. We will carry them into the next stage or part of life. I am going to grieve the loss of fall, and everything that comes with it. I am going to press into the pain and feel it, and I am going to come out on the other end fuller and more ready for life.
I encourage you to do the same with the losses, past or present, in your life. It isn’t easy, and it hurts but it is so worth it.
