Behind the Puddle

Today, the calendar says September. Apparently, that means something has changed. I looked outside this morning, though, and the puddle appears to have missed the announcement.

The same water and trees are still there. The birds continue to arrive expecting breakfast. Pinecone has made no noticeable adjustments for the new month. The geese aren’t carrying tiny pumpkin-spice beverages.

Despite my enthusiasm for the arrival of the “ber” months, summer hasn’t packed its belongings and left. It still looks very much like yesterday. But I know better now. Something is changing.

The days have already been getting shorter, and the light falls differently across the puddle. The babies I watched earlier in the summer aren’t babies anymore. Some of the visitors who once seemed to be here every day appear less often. The sounds are changing, and the mornings will eventually become cooler.

One of these days, I’ll look across the puddle and realize the trees don’t look quite the way I remember them looking today. There probably won’t be a moment when autumn suddenly arrives. It will become autumn while I’m busy watching something else.

I think many of life’s transitions happen that way. We tend to recognize the obvious ones, such as a new job, a move, a marriage, a birth, a death, a diagnosis, a retirement, or a child leaving home. Those are the moments when life clearly divides itself into before and after. But some transitions don’t give us a date. They begin quietly.

A relationship changes a little at a time. Someone begins needing us differently, a child needs us less, or our bodies ask us to adjust. Something that once mattered enormously begins mattering less. Something we never expected to care about becomes important.

A place we have known for years may begin feeling different, or we may begin feeling different inside it. Sometimes we don’t recognize that we are in a transition until we are already well into it. Maybe that’s because change usually begins before there is anything obvious to see.

There is something uncomfortable about that middle place. We know something is shifting, but we don’t know what it will become. We want to name it, understand it, prepare for it, and preferably control it. Sometimes, there simply isn’t enough information yet.

September seems comfortable with that. It doesn’t need to prove that autumn is coming. It simply continues moving toward it. Each slightly shorter day, cooler morning, changing leaf, departing visitor, and new arrival becomes part of the transition. Eventually, what was quietly becoming is simply what is.

Maybe transition isn’t the space between two lives. Maybe transition is part of life. We don’t stop living while one chapter becomes another. We are still here.

We continue having ordinary mornings, feeding birds, laughing, worrying, loving people, making dinner, and figuring things out. Life keeps happening while change quietly rearranges the details. We do not have to understand the transition completely before we are allowed to live within it.

The calendar may have turned the page overnight. Life rarely does. Life changes slowly enough that sometimes the only evidence is that, one day, we look back and realize we aren’t quite where we used to be.

Today, I don’t need September to look different. I don’t need to know exactly what is changing. Maybe it is enough to recognize that something always is. Behind the puddle, another season is quietly becoming. Maybe I am too.