And so, here we are again. Graham has moved off to the Quiz Bowl house and UNC's school year has kicked off. Natalie has returned to NYC, soon to begin her new job at the City and Country School in Greenwich Village and continue with her M.Ed. program at Hunter. Mary and I, once more, find ourselves empty nesters. Things are, admittedly, easier.
The worst of the heat seems to have past, at least for a week or so. Right now I'm on the porch in shorts and flip flops and my toes are, it must be owned, a little chilly.
If we've made one mistake this summer, it's the same one we made last summer, a typical parent mistake. That is, because we were bending our schedules to match Graham's work schedule in Raleigh, we didn't get out to a family vacation or even really any vacation till late in the game. Yes, we are making up for it at the tail end with last week's trip to the mountaints, Mary and I will have a week of remedial vacation in the Adirondacks right after Labor Day before a wedding 9/6. Even the week or so I will spend in Seattle in the 2nd half of September will have some leisure aspects mixed in, with Mary there at the beginning before continuing up to Alaska to take more pictures.
But as we learned last summer, September travel, though it has the advantages of fewer people and easier access to services (restaurants, parking, traffic, etc) also has the disadvantages of mostly being populated by older people. You see fewer people, most of them older. So you miss out on the joy of seeing children and other families and the access it offers to the memories of what it was like to be at those life stages ourselves.
All the same, the lack of traffic lines at restaurants and brutal heat has a certain charm to it.
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