Moth Season.

There is a small window in my kitchen that stays open all summer long, unless the wind is chilly and from the wrong direction. It opens, just where I stand to make my morning tea, onto a wild and barely contained rugosa rose bush, that conceals all of the garden view, except a patch of sky. On rainy days the dripping green outside this window is like a doorway to an emerald kingdom where tiny creatures scurry and creep and scuttle. The scent of roses is subtle, but so intoxicating it transports me without effort, holds me in a green dream, even fleetingly, as I make tea, or prepare meals, like a small anchor in this sea of moments.

This morning is the first morning in a while that I am up significantly early to noticed the touch of autumn in the air that drifts in as the sun rises, and I am reminded of the swift approach of the end of the holidays, of school, ahead. Once again, each morning the walls of the house are lined with dustly moths, and in the evenings, the spiders line up along the windows like sentries. We are entering the cooling season, my favourite time of year, and the reeds in the marsh are almost at their fullest, the sound of now a late summer hush, as opposed to their winter rattle.

We have had a particularly wonderful summer. There has been lots of camping, lots of gatherings of friends, where we cram as many of us as possible into houses and tents, around kitchen tables, under gazebos, and make it last as long as we can, squeezing as much fun and games and food and laughter into our time together as we can. There has been a lot of rain, but lots of sunny days too, and we are excellent at seizing those and running out the door, so there have been lots of impromptu beach days too, the kind where we go up a hill and end up down on a beach, and then we cannot leave. The beach bag has a permanent spot in my car, just in case. And we are not done yet.
The result is a dusty house with the words Bare Minimum stamped in all the corners, on every pile of laundry and papers, a neglected blog, a car full of sand, but sun kissed, happy faces round the dinner table in the evenings.

We have also had a family wedding. A heartwarming, momentous wedding that was most definitely the highlight for us all.

So now we face The Winding Down, and I am eyeing those other to-do lists that involve the word 'school' in them, knowing I have put everything off until the last minute, knowing that this autumn brings significant changes to our little household, for me in particular, for, among other things, I must get a job. A proper, paid job. Something which every mother who stays home with her babies must do when the day comes, something which I have put off for a year and cannot justify any longer, and the artist in me balks at as I dream about the Making/Writing Hours to myself that I am giving up. But it is also something which I am excited about, albeit completely bemused by.
We shall see how that goes.

I am working on some other significant changes here at Milkmoon, too. Something which just seems like the right thing to do. I have come to realise that my dwindling commitment to this blog is nothing more than the fact that it hasn't evolved to reflect how things are changing for me personally, that I became little stuck, in terms of what I blog.
It's all good, and I do hope you think so too! It's something I am very excited about and look forward to  launching the all-new-and-improved Milkmoon in the next month.

Well, it's turning into a blustery day, but the sun is out, and so we are taking ourselves off out again.
That to-do list, and that pile of laundry, (okay, mountain of laundry), and all those dust bunnies, they'll have to wait another day.