A Season of Favorites...

The children often ask what is my favorite time of year, and inevitably, after considering the happy features of different times of the year, when it comes down to it Fall always wins. But it is a difficult choice, since immediately the charm of winter and especially Christmas tug at my conscience, as well as the joyful buddings of life and Easter glory in spring. However, Fall, rich in memory and crisp in leaves and warm in sweaters and tea and coffee and cocoa and comforting food and the first fires in the hearth, wins us over. The children at first list the happy days of summer but then agree that it is much nicer to try to get warm when it is cold rather than try to get cool when it is hot; plus the Georgia summers are riddled with mosquitoes and other biting things - ticks, snakes, wasps, poison ivy - and often unbearable heat (despite the constant evening thunderstorms). So, the consensus is 'Fall is favorite' once again.

The temperatures have just begun to drop and we have had some refreshingly chilly mornings recently, a welcome respite to seemingly over-warm October days. True, we are now scrambling to find warm socks and long sleeves, but the change of seasons is always welcome and rejuvenating. Somehow, the chorelist of last Fall is only partially checked-off, and the children are still playing shepherd while the goats graze, since we don't have a perimeter fence or properly sectioned-off pastures. It is a good thing to get to do, though, and a lovely and consoling sight in a world gone mad and continually ever madder: a peaceful and wholesome scene of children sitting in a field near a small herd of goats nibbling grass. It is a welcome sight especially since, as usual, the animals provide a healthy dose of confusion, angst, mess, and seemingly incorrigible annoyance to punctuate what might be seen at least fleetingly as monotonous days. We watched a charming Heidi movie last year, and while the climes and vistas of Georgia cannot compare to the Alps, that movie charmed most in the purity of that little girl's environs - a bounteous natural scene bursting with sublimity and exclaiming God's glory - and it helped me register a little deeper in gratitude for the life and verdure offered here in our own back yard, especially with the happy and patient duties laid upon our children's shoulders. We hear machinery in the not-so-far distance these days, developers constantly threatening to eat up every spare patch of land, and the highway sounds closer with the summer foliage dropping away (making us kid that we are like Burton's Little House), yet still we have our own little space tucked just enough away to enjoy a piece of the world in relative peace.

Devotionally, these months are rich in Marian feasts and themes, as well as the upcoming great Feast of All Saints, to which we very much look forward. In September we offered our sufferings with Our Lady of Sorrows; in October we have celebrated the magnificent Christian victory by Our Lady's intercession at the Battle of Lepanto, and pray daily the Holy Rosary with renewed fervor; soon we will join our hearts to the saints who have forged our path to heaven by trial, sacrifice, blood, and unshakable virtue, and devote ourselves in prayer to the salvation of poor souls in purgatory. 

To days of reflection, in the most memory-laden of natural seasons, on the very highest order of things! May God continue to guide, bless, and protect our family and loved ones on our pilgrim way!