Labor Day is quiet. In a sense, people are a little unsure about what to do with an extra day, a quiet Monday. And then, Boom! School buses come early for the teens who didn't get enough sleep, later buses for the middle grades and the little kids. As the whole country knows, when school is in session, parents' lives change. The life of the whole society changes. Get to bed on time, wake up on time. Have plans and carry them out. Energy instead of sunbathing.
It is not just school. It is temperature, too. Especially at our latitude, we expect more cold. Not long before a frost and for most plants, the end of the growing season and the beginning of the harvest.
Here we have our local university beginning classes. This year, the school has nearly 10,000 students. The entire campus and all the faculty is alive in a way it more or less slept since the end of spring. These days, it is not unusual for middle-aged and older people to be students, those who never finished college or who skipped it altogether and now have questions about knowledge, history or themselves. Family lives get changed around to accomodate study hours, class hours and various sorts of research, reading and team work.
Sports! Football, cross-country, pre-season for wrestling and basketball. Teams jogging in large groups on the streets and roads to get in shape.
Between school supplies and Christmas gifts, not to mention Halloween and Thanksgiving, the most important, most commercially powerful, the most heart-felt holidays start to loom up.
In our town, about 400 senior citizens are part of an organization called L.I.F.E., which stands for Learning Is ForEver. It's very full fall season of lectures and trips opens up and we begin trooping into campus buildings to hear about travel and bugs and fish and a very large variety of subjects.
Martian observers will be surprised today when they see large spikes in activity. Suddenly, we are gripped by autumn and energy.
Bill
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