Celebrating Fall

The glories of October:  brilliant leaves, crisp sunshine, and kids home from college.  Sabbatical is about many things, thanking supporters, speaking, recruiting, rest.  But right up there in the list is the sacrament of the present moment, the grasping of grace in this one point in time which will not come again, when Julia turns 19, when Jack is half-way through his first semester, when Luke recovers from surgery while studying the same.  So we pause to celebrate Fall.  To be thankful for trees, for homework at the kitchen table, for friends from Africa stopping in, for baking, for full laundry lines.  For being part of the pay-it-forward as so many have welcomed our children in the past, so we could have kids from Istanbul (Turkey), Houston (Texas), Santa Cruz (California), and Scotland/Kenya all converging.  Hikes, card games, working on the pizza oven project, shooting skeet, driving the tractor, ATV's, writing papers, watching movies, making cookies, telling stories.  And even, on the long drive back, a stop at the longest or highest single arch bridge in the Western Hemisphere at New River Gorge (engineers on a field trip).  Well worth the nearly 800 mile round trip, twice, a 13-hour day for Scott and then another one for me to pick up and drop off our Dukies.  The glories of October.