The Last Day of Summer

What better way to spend the last day of summer than at the beach?

We’re staying in a house up on stilts a short walk from the beach. In the early morning, sitting on the veranda, you can hear crickets and cicadas in the fields, and birds singing on the utility wires. In the evening, choruses of frogs replace the birds of the morning. There’s the scent of the fresh-cut grass from the field across the way, mixed with the aroma of the Gulf carried up by the south-easterly breeze. Every once in a while, someone drives by, sticks an arm out the window of a pickup truck and waves.

Down on the beach, you mostly hear the surf and the calling of the gulls. In the middle of the week, the beach is empty, except for a fisherman or two. They are pretty friendly, old folks for the most part, and you eventually realize that they stop to chat because they see you as one of them — just another old geezer with time to spare. The air today has a particular freshness, a hint that the season is about to change. It’s still hot — we’re in Texas after all — but the heat is just a little less aggressive.

We are doing nothing much — reading books, cooking a light meal, walking in the surf and ignoring our cell phones, mostly. To send the summer off, we went out on the beach at sunset and watched Venus shining brightly in the darkening sky and saw the stars come out over the water.

Tomorrow will feel much the same, but it will be autumn, and another year will speed to its end.

Beach Girls

Lillian Visits!

After a very difficult week, there is no better medicine than to pick up a certain six-year old and spend some time swinging (an old favorite activity) and visiting Pokestops and catching Pokemon (a new favorite). 

She is having fun at her new school, making friends and learning lots of stuff. I’m not sure exactly what, since six-year olds quickly lose patience with the earnest interrogations of their grandparents. But we have learned that her favorite part of school is art. At least it was at the moment she answered the question. 

Back when we started this blog, we made regular posts on gains in weight of a gram or two, and other vital stats. Now, these get measured once a year, and with less concern for precision. But she is growing as she should and is in the 50th percentile in height and 20th in weight. Approximately.