"Life Starts All Over Again When It Gets Crisp in the Fall"

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall”

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote this in The Great Gatsby and it has been on my mind a lot lately.  Maybe because this week as a sub I worked in a classroom that was reading it, and it is by far one of my most favorite novels of all time.  I have teacher envy when it comes to this book because I am simply dying to teach it in my own classroom!  Nerdy aspirations aside, it’s more likely that I live in one of the most beautiful regions of this country, especially during the fall.

Now I know a lot of you, (or maybe two of you since this blog has been dormant for so long and I think only three people read it!) are rolling your eyes and thinking to yourself that I have officially lost it.  But it’s true.  Rhode Island is a beautiful state, and as an added bonus we get all four seasons.  And what a show off this state can be during the month of October!  Today we went to the Scituate Art Festival, a yearly tradition especially as someone who grew up in Scituate.  And as I walked under the banner this year, I couldn’t help but smile and of course snap a picture with my phone.  And it’s not just the foliage, the apple dumplings, doughboys oh yeah and the art; it’s the annual homecoming.  Taking a stroll down West Greenville Road I can remember walking hand in hand with my father as a young child to hit his favorite spot of course, the sausage and peppers stand!  I can see myself and my friends, experiencing some new found freedom as eighth graders roaming the festival by ourselves, checking out boys and feeling oh so grown up!  I remember the weekends spent behind cash registers to raise money for chorus trips, the one crazy weekend I thought my 86 Nova could drive down the center of the Festival, rushing to the Festival after taking the SAT’s, or singing in the Congregational Church with the Scituate High School chorus, the very same church I later got married in!

When confronted with memories of your past, especially those centered during high school, it’s hard not to reminisce and with that I had a feeling of a clean slate; of life starting over again with the falling of the leaves and the crispness in the air.  Now when I go to the Art Festival, it’s with my beautiful family and we have our itinerary mapped out before we park the car.  We know we are going to visit the same artist and buy a print since we have been doing so since we were pregnant with Brady.  We didn’t know if Brady was a Brady or a Betty when we bought the first print, we just knew that Eric Sturtevant’s pictures were what we wanted our baby to see on his or her walls!  Five years later and Brady picks out his own prints and bookmarks!  We know we’re going to get an apple dumpling which I’ll pay extremely close attention to so I can attempt to replicate it later in the weekend.  Much to my husband’s dismay, we know we’re going to stop at the library book sale so I can add to the growing bookshelves, bins and piles I have stashed away.  We know I’ll bump into at least a few people I haven’t seen in a while and reminisce on how young we used to be, and how old our mid thirties feels!  It’s the same, but different.  Life is starting over again, similar to the New Year, however for some reason the New Year begins Columbus Day weekend for me.  And it’s with this sense of newness, of life beginning over again that I have decided again to try and blog AGAIN!  Maybe I’ll stick to it, maybe life will get in the way.  And if so, there’s always next Fall to grab me by the shoulders and kick-start my "New Year's" resolutions.