Reflections on Screwing Up
Fall in New Mexico is reds and greens, purples and golds. The air is fresh and crisp, the sky is very blue, the rain is sporadic and the wind is dramatic. (See how I did that? I'm so clever. {snicker}) There is a different kind of beauty here, a wilder, unrestrained magic that floats on the turquoise sea.
Tonight Josh was all amped up on reading - he literally couldn't sleep and spent a lot of time searching the shadows of his room. He couldn't soak the words up fast enough, flipping pages and drifting in his internal imaginative world. He's more than halfway done with The Sea of Monsters and he laughingly revealed that he flipped to the final pages of the book series and now he 'knows how it ends'. And he's still reading anyway. It makes me giddy.
He also forgot his Science homework. Which makes 4 out of 6 days of forgetting. He was pretty upset over the whole thing. He cried - no he sobbed, which pretty much breaks my heart into tiny pieces. He sat on my lap (he's almost as big as I am...not really, but it feels that way) and pressed his ruddy cheeks into my shoulder and wiped furiously at the tears that betrayed him. It was awful. I told him about the time I lost $500 at work. (We never found it btw.) I told him that all people make mistakes, that my boss knew I didn't mean to lose it, that I worked really hard to make up for it. I told him that the point is what you do AFTER the mistake, the point is not making a mistake again.
Fall for me is cleaning up the mistakes. The weeds that invaded your garden all die off and blow away. The world brushes away the splendor and settles down for slumber. Even the sky grows gray and somber, thinking, reflecting, resting. Time for renewal and shoring up the foundations for the next go 'round.
We all need to strip down to basics sometimes, to shed the finery. Of course, in place of finery I'm busy packing on the winter weight. But that's another story.
