The In-between Time
Saturday, September 7, 2013 at 4:04PM 
Oh, this September sky, like a blue canvas decorated with dollops of white. The sun is a warm companion to the suddenly cool breeze. This is an in-between time, not-quite-summer, not-quite-fall. Autumn is my favorite season, but every year I paw and clutch at the last days of summer, not ready to give up fresh tomatoes, bare feet, and long evenings of lingering light. But already the evenings are noticeably shorter, the sunset coming an hour sooner than I expect it. These in-between days are so sweet, a honeyed ripening and mellowing into something darker and richer in the months to come.
We say things like, "I can't believe the summer's over!", or "I can't believe it's back to school already!" But what's not to believe? The months and seasons turn again and again, the same pattern, the same speed, year after year. Of course, it doesn't feel that way. Remember when the wait for Christmas or your birthday was unbearably slow and sweet, like hot toffee strung between two spoons? Now, as adults, we blink -- and time snaps like peanut brittle. Before we know it we're always back at the end of the year or the beginning again.
A few years ago, my great aunt, who was in her eighties then, told me that she sometimes looks in the mirror and thinks, Who's that old lady?
"I know I'm old," she told me. "But I don't feel old on the inside. I just feel like me."
My mother told me something similar when she was in her fifties. At the time I was in my late twenties, and I'd started to have a hunch that I may never feel like a real grown-up, that there was no magic age at which people feel like they have life all figured out and know what they're doing. I'm in my late thirties now, and despite being wiser and more well-equipped to deal with certain life situations than I was a decade or two ago, I often feel like I'm not qualified to be an adult.
I can't believe I've been out of high school for 19 years, out of college for 15, married for 12. I can't believe I still haven't published a book or made up my mind about having a baby. I can't believe that I'm closer to middle age than to adolescence. But what's not to believe?
I've started to paw and clutch at the months and years, that same bittersweet end-of-summer feeling driving me to hold on to the waning days of youth. I still wear my hair in pigtails sometimes, and I occasionally get carded when ordering a drink, but 40 is just three doors down, and it seems like I'm traveling this road faster and faster each year.
I feel like I'm running out of time -- and I am. We all are. There's nothing novel about a midlife crisis or sensing the yawning cavern of your own mortality. I'm not trying to be morbid. I'm just trying to make sense of this living and getting older. It's what we're all doing, I suppose. Before we know it, it will be October and then January and then December, whether we can believe it or not.
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Reader Comments (2)
I'm in my late fifties (did I just say that!?) I feel different, but not old. Sometimes I feel like I'm in one long ever changing moment. I guess, in a way, we are. As a late bloomer, I sometimes get tangled up about how much time I have left live my dreams. But lately it's more about paying attention to this lovely shifting moment and softening into what feels good and right to do next.