Cusp

And so we arrive at the time when the pinks of sunburn become the reds of maples. We atone for the summer of lazy days and hazy skies and find crystal blue mornings with our breath fogging aloft as we start our day.



It is a reminder for those of us who live where seasons start and end with abrupt delineations; not say, those in Florida who can only determine the season by the calendar.



I love the transition of Fall, I love the heightening beauty of an object as it begins to die, like trees consumed by flames as they reach their apogee of color and then sputter and crumple in bits and pieces strewn on the ground. Whole forests engulfed.



But then just empty and brittle husks, beneath skeletal remains.



That's later...for now we are just on the cusp of Fall.



For people born under the astrological signs that fall on seasonal cusps, they carry the energy of both signs...or so I'm told. But with a daughter with one foot squarely in summer and another in autumn, I believe I've seen the delicate balance as these two seasons collide in colors, temperatures and intensities...

She is a kid with a popsicle. Perpetual laughter that splinters the humidity of an afternoon. She is a hot-house plant, craving the covers and blankets when the house dips below 73-degrees.

She is exceptionally placid, a smooth plain of a lake in a day without breeze. She is effervescent, the clanging melodies of the ice-cream truck as she flits through her day.

She was named after a flower, which thrives in full sun...and as described provides a seemingly endless parade of blooms. But she is far from delicate, far from frail. Her personality shines as a thousand day summer, and while she has been handed some exceptionally tough cards in her all-too wonderful life, she remains bouyant, and shining. She beams. She radiates. She has created a sun from which many fall into its gravitational pull.

The transition to fall, and the intermingling of high pressure systems colliding with cool jet stream air creates the opportunities for thunderstorms, the chance of showers. But like lightning seen across a darkened sea, it smolders mostly on the horizon. Her intensity flares mostly on the playing field, at a time when her energies and focus are on performance and the desire to excel.

It is mostly in this fall sport where her autumn begins to show.

But it peaks in other times, like the smoldering embers of a late November fire. The direction of intellect and energy, a keen focus on achievement, a single-mindedness that is rare for somebody just shy of two decades old...

And like trying to predict the chaos of summer-swinging into fall weather, she provides her fair share of unpredictability. She has the confidence to swashbuckle, to hang by a thin-thread rope and dive violently into a challenge. She has the confidence to question, virtually everything, to reconcile in her sometimes-closed but many times open mind. She has the perspective of a humbled survivor, and she has had to pick herself up with the help of a couple of people and brush herself off. Again. And again.

She is no wide-eyed ingenue. She surprisingly defaults to cynicism, until she learns or experiences something to offer new value in a new perspective. She sometimes can be cool as an October morning...but her sun burns away the mist fairly quickly. Her sunrise returns.

She shares the same first initial with my wife, a choice made deliberately. If I ever got a tattoo, it would always be an "A". They share many of the same traits, many of the same elements, a clear apple from the tree. Although my wife is infinitely more patient, while my daughter has inherited my hair-triggered intolerance for stupidity...or perhaps those less capable of displaying their intellect.

But as she moves into her days, in some way we are watching her teenage summer come to an end, a fall that begins her transition into the fully blessed and legal definition of an adult.

It's how you feel when you leave the beach. When you lock the door on a summer home. It's time to return to the chores, the jobs, the responsibilities...in this case, it is how I used to feel when I saw her baby shoes on the stairs. The speed of change fractures the heart of a parent, but the burgeoning adult that emerges is a wonderful event to behold.

It is not a single day event, but rather a transition. It is watching the beauty of something turn bright with color and emerge even more beautiful than when it started.

It is a tree on the cusp of autumn color. It is an afternoon, transitioning to evening in pastels. It is a daughter, on the cusp of a 20th birthday, born on the cusp of the seasons of summer and fall.