Resisting the temptation.

I'm a house divided right now. There's something about shifting seasons that makes me want to plan the crap out of my life. It's a tough urge to resist. Fall is my favorite season. I love getting up when it's still dark out and turning on NPR while I make coffee. I love the smell of breakfast coming before morning rays, like it's that much more potent and necessary without light seeping in and diluting the concentration of two eggs over easy. The daylight is crotchety, like it has somewhere else to be and us Pacific Northwesterners keep refilling its coffee cup and insisting it stay a few more minutes. This is when all the orange and yellow and green vegetables shoulder out the reds and blues and purples of summer. Suddenly it's pumpkins and cider and woodsmoke instead of iced tea and BBQs. And, by now, that's okay. The chickens go to bed earlier and earlier each night and get up later each morning. Buster is lazier, still crying to be outside but a little easier to get in when the sun goes down and a cold mist settles in the treetops. This is the season of crisp books, new windshield wipers, tea at night instead of cold beer, cornstalks, foggy windows, crunchy leaves and blistered hands from raking them up. This is the best time of the year, when you eagerly anticipate the short days, the thudding rain, the biting air. It's time for festivals and rodeos and decorations and music. The next four months are a collective celebration of falling leaves, goblins, feasting and lights.

I would like to forget myself in the spirit of the season. I'm trying anyway. Right now we have a dog crate of two sick chickens on the porch. The gutters on this house are saggy and probably full of mulched leaves from last fall. The swail in the front yard is grinning in anticipation of a mouthful of rain water and we'll have to walk through it since a pile of muddy dirt is slouching against the other gate. The tomatoes grew so big (and still so green) that their infrastructure collapsed onto the squashes. The other garden has gone back to nature. If we just took down the crappy white wire fence it would look like part of the yard. The back patio never happened but we have a bare patch of dirt where we put our good intentions. And Suzy's path around the side of the house is getting slick on those wet night walks to close the chickens in.

There are always things to do. Having this PAT test looming over my very near future keeps me anxious and casting about for alternatives to focus my nerves on. It's easy to wish for a cleaner house, no chickens on the porch, or a full bank account than it is to realistically think about this test and what I stand to gain from passing it. Less than two weeks until the day.