Oh to be in New Hampshire...

Rumor has it that it’s fall. Tell that to Florida’s weather. I’m sure those of you shoveling snow already want to shoot me, but I’m still wearing shorts.

It’s not pretty.

Thank goodness for air conditioning and the Internet. Here are some fun and interesting things I’ve discovered recently. Hope you enjoy! Have a pumpkin spice latte for me.

Check out my most recent article, “A Heart Full of Horses,” in America’s Horse here.

There is good in the world. I loved this sweet story.

Forget my house, I want to declutter my mind. Here are some tips from Happiful magazine. I’m working on number one and number five in particular.

As my work has gotten busier, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I use my time. In “How to Declare Time Independence,” Laura Vanderkam writes, “Time passes whether or not we think about how we’re spending it, so it’s easy to spend time mindlessly. Days go by and years go by, always filled with something. The question is whether these things that fill our time are necessary, meaningful, or enjoyable.”

Some great lessons here: “8 Little Wake-Up Calls You Need to Receive Before It’s Too Late.” Simple and true.

This little guy made me smile. I just wanted to hug him. (Not a good idea.)

This cracked me up:

Happy Friday!

I recently participated in Sarah Jenks’ Live More Challenge. For two weeks, I put more thought into what would make life more delicious, what would feed my life (rather than just my body), and for two weeks I noticed a genuine lightening of my spirits. I looked forward to each day’s challenge. I also learned that living more required planning, and I need to make time for fun every day. (You can see my Live More posts if you follow me on Instagram.)  

While this may sound frivolous in the face of this world’s tragedies, I’ve learned that my being unhappy will not make this world safer or better. My being happy, however, just might rub off on those around me, and help someone else feel better, too. So with that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of 25 simple pleasures for us to try. Won’t you join me?

1. Instead of a blaring alarm clock, wake up to music, nature sounds, or something else that pleases your ear.

2. Call a friend—or (gasp!) write a letter.

3. Take a nap (I won’t tell). 

4. Crank up some music. Choose music from the time you were happiest for an extra boost. 

5. Clean or declutter a drawer or shelf.

6. Bake something and share with a friend or neighbor.

7. Read, sketch, or simply people watch at a coffee shop. If you’re into pumpkin spice lattes, now’s the time to order one! 

8. Go picking—find an orchard or farm that hosts you pick opportunities and fill a basket or bag with fresh produce.

9. Finish a project. Whether it’s a bathroom update or an art project, fixing something that’s broken, or mending an item of clothing.

10. Buy one perfect treat (cupcake, scone, handmade chocolate, glass of wine, etc.). Consume it without any distractions and enjoy every mouthful.

11. Buy or collect fresh flowers. Find a place to put them where the cat won’t eat them. (Or is this a problem only I have?)

12. Schedule a field trip to explore someplace new. Or revisit a place you love—your choice.

13. Perform an anonymous act of kindness.

14. Look the cashier (or the server, or the librarian) in the eye and smile.

15. You know that pile of magazines you’ve been meaning to read? Grab it and curl up in bed for a couple of hours.

16. Take a walk in your neighborhood with your camera or phone. Take photos of your favorite places and things—anything that grabs your attention. 

17. Sit comfortably for 10 minutes and do nothing. (It’s harder than it sounds.)

18. Take a class, in person or online. Choose something you’ve always wanted to try. Some fun ones I’ve come across: soap making, altered journals, aromatherapy, wine making. Of course, I highly recommend my friend Laure’s art classes.

19. Drink a cold glass of water. You’ll be refreshed and energized—just watch out for brain freeze.

20. Tell someone a joke.

21. Sip a hot cup of tea, coffee, or cocoa.

22. Rewatch your favorite movie. Maybe even eat some popcorn.

23. Sit outside, close your eyes and listen. See if you can identify five different sounds.

24. Groom your dog/cat/rabbit/ferret/horse. Give him or her treats and extra love. I still miss my dog so much, so be sure you enjoy them while you have them. 

Paris was, in a word, fantastique!

I’ve been to Paris before, but it was always a brief stop on my way someplace else. This time, I spent 12 full days exploring what the city has to offer.

It wasn’t nearly long enough.

Paris is huge, noisy, busy, a city layered with history and culture—and while I was there, a city of brilliant blue skies and mellow light that glowingly illuminated the stone buildings. We had nearly perfect weather, and I can’t help wondering if my impressions would have been different if it had been cold and gray. I feel lucky to have seen Paris at her fall best—lit up by the sun, the trees just beginning to change, with blooming flowers everywhere. Oh, I miss it.

Today I’ll share just a few photos and impressions, because I’m still sorting through my journal and photos (and thoughts). I feel like someone picked me up, shook me vigorously, and returned me to earth, everything still whirling around inside my head. Paris feels like a million years ago, even though it’s only been a little more than a month (already?) since we touched down at Charles de Gaulle airport.

Laure Ferlita, of The Imaginary Realm and Painted Thoughts blog, and I flew to Paris a few days before her watercolor workshop started. A third friend (hi, Claire!) joined us, and we rented an apartment through Airbnb for the days before we met the rest of the group. That worked beautifully for us, and our apartment host was outstanding (hi, Helen!). If you will be spending more than a few days in Paris, renting an apartment is a fun option. It’s generally cheaper than a Paris hotel, and you get more of a flavor of what it’s like to live in Paris.

Some highlights from our first days included:

The most delicious savory crepe I’ve ever tasted from a little restaurant we randomly chose on our way to the metro station our first morning. It was good, but is there anything as delicious as your first hot meal and cup of coffee when you’ve traveled to a new place and you’re really hungry?

Exploring Rue Cler, a popular market street.  We enjoyed people watching as much as we enjoyed the shops and restaurants. I spent a bundle on tea at Mariage Freres. I’m drinking a cup of Paris Earl Grey as I type this. A highlight for me was a cup of coffee, a buffalo mozzarella flatbread pizza, and sketching at Café Central.

Everywhere we walked, we came upon architecture and details that caught our eyes:

“A new season is blowing up the valley, drifting over the hills, rising up from a cooling earth, a new season with its challenges, its changes, its excitements, and its own particular rhythms and miracles.”

—Jean Hersey, The Shape of a Year

What simple pleasures and everyday adventures do you anticipate this fall?

Photo courtesy Micah H.

Do you feel it? It’s fall. At least according to the calendar (and in the Northern Hemisphere). Many places, central Florida included, still feel like summer, but fall began yesterday, with the fall equinox at 10:21 a.m.

“Equinox,” which comes from Latin, means “equal night.” The fall equinox is one of the two days a year when day and night are equal—and some say the earth is in balance.

Besides balance, other concepts connected to the fall equinox include wholeness, reflection, and pause. Traditionally, it is a time of harvest, and a time of storing up for the winter.

As you know, fall is my favorite season. A time when I eagerly wait for the first cold front of the year to bring in drier, cooler air. While that is still likely a month or more away, the light looks different already—the way it falls, the shadows it casts. And my horse is growing his winter coat.

Fall is a lull between summer and the rush of the holiday season. It’s the perfect time to reflect on how the year has gone so far, and how we wish it to finish up. The perfect time to evaluate the balance of our lives, and our inner harvests.

It’s also a time of storing away for the future. We consider what we can to do prepare for the winter ahead, both literal and figurative. We tweak our habits and create comforting rituals for when times get tough. While we’re feeling good is the time to prepare for times we don’t feel so good.

Of course, we can’t stay balanced perfectly all the time, or we’ll never make progress towards our big dreams. Sometimes one area of life has to suffer in order for another to leap forward or thrive. For me, this year has been about building my freelance business and renovating our master bathroom. Many areas of interest and activity have taken a back seat while I concentrate on these ongoing projects. Even so, I still seek balance between doing and being, between giving and receiving, between thinking and feeling, and between work and play. Striving for the type of balance that feels right brings wholeness.

What is your favorite thing about fall?

Signs of fall:

Changing leaves (nope).

A nip in the air (haha—nope).

Sweater weather (I think we’ve established this already…no and no and no).

Pumpkin everywhere (yes)!

Here in Florida, fall won’t start for another month at least, and that’s if we’re lucky. We don’t have changing leaves, but we do have pumpkin. Pumpkin bread, pumpkin bagels, and Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Lattes. While I’m waiting for fall, my favorite season, I’ll make pumpkin pie cookie dough energy balls and pumpkin cranberry bread. And yes, I will indulge in a Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte. (Rumor has it Pumpkin Spice Lattes now contain some real pumpkin!)

“Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.”

—Stanley Horowitz

“After the keen still days of September, the October sun filled the world with mellow warmth...The maple tree in front of the doorstep burned like a gigantic red torch. The oaks along the roadway glowed yellow and bronze. The fields stretched like a carpet of jewels, emerald and topaz and garnet. Everywhere she walked the color shouted and sang around her...In October any wonderful unexpected thing might be possible.”

—Elizabeth George Speare, The Witch of Blackbird Pond

Is there anything more optimistic and hopeful than planting a garden? 

This weekend, my husband and I prepared our largest garden bed for fall planting. We had to dig out the old soil, pull up the tree roots creeping into the bed, put down cardboard to slow their return, and refill the bed with a mixture of the old soil and a good helping of fresh soil from our compost heap. It was hot, drippy work, but we were left with a beautiful, ready-to-be-planted bed.

That’s what we’re hoping for, along with a few other Florida cold season crops.

There are many garden-to-life metaphors/parallels/life lessons, such as: in gardening as in life you have to get your hands dirty if you want things to grow, or gardening and life both have “seasons,” and so on. One of my favorite lessons, however, is that beautiful things can come from unprepossessing beginnings. Tiny, dead-looking seeds produce luscious tomatoes, beautiful blooms, crunchy carrots, and aromatic herbs. This makes me feel hopeful that when I feel parched and withered, with the right care and nurturing I can produce something beautiful and delicious, too. Even though each seed contains new life, it will not sprout unless its growing conditions are met. The spark of creativity and life within me must be nurtured as well. All I need to do is look around me for the nurturing I need to grow and bloom. And, sometimes the hardest part, allow myself that nurturing, whether it is a delicious meal, an afternoon nap, a coffee date with a friend, or half an hour spent daydreaming and listening to music.

I’ve been feeling tired, parched, and withered lately. While I have been allowing myself time for dormancy, for just chillin’, I’m ready to leave this stage and move on to the next. My favorite season—fall—is coming and with it, the cooler, drier air that always gives me an energy lift. I want to feel that spark of creative energy wake up inside me, and I want to grow and bloom the way our garden will (I hope). While I’m waiting, I’m going to pay careful attention to my growing conditions.

Perhaps this happens to you? You go on a trip someplace, and come home filled with the desire to make changes, to simplify and purge, to get things done, to live fully and embrace life.

Or is it just me?

I came home from our trip to New England filled with plans to:

Redo my schedule, setting aside much more time for reading and writing.

Learn about early American history.

Read and reread Louisa May Alcott’s works, and Walden. (FYI: note that Walden and Little Women are both free through Amazon’s Kindle. Links are below.)

Clean out all my closets.

And much more. Will I do those things? I don’t know—it depends on how long my recharging lasts. (I am so missing the cool, crisp weather, for it is repulsively warm and humid here right now, but We Will Not Speak of This. Cooler days are coming, I just need to hang on!)

I’ll write more about the trip next week, and share more photos, but today I’ll give you a little taste of two of my favorite experiences. (Click to enlarge the photos.)

Walden Pond

I read and enjoyed Walden several years ago, though I’m embarrassed to say it didn’t make much of a lasting impression on me. Still, when I found that we could visit Walden Pond, and see the site of Thoreau’s cabin while we were in Concord, I jumped at the chance. And I’m so glad I did. Walden Pond is a “kettle hole,” formed by a retreating glacier, in some places over 100 feet deep. We were able to walk all the way around it, soaking up the fresh air, the bright leaves, and watching people enjoying the park in their own ways—we saw men fishing, several families with children walking in the woods, a paddle boarder and two wetsuit-clad people swimming! Even though there were quite a few others there (and I’m sure it’s mobbed in the warmer months), it didn’t feel crowded and you could sense the peace and beauty that must have drawn Thoreau here.

Orchard House

Just down the road from Walden sits Orchard House, the Alcott (as in Louisa May) family home for 20 years. Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women while living here, at a small half-circle of a desk her father built into a wall of her room. (No photos were allowed inside, so I can’t show you what it looked like.) The house was already old when the Alcotts lived there, with the settling you’d expect of an old house. Orchard House was named for the apple orchard that once surrounded it, but Louisa called it “Apple Slump” because she felt like it was “slumping” into the ground, according to our tour guide. The Alcotts were an interesting and talented family—one of Louisa’s sisters was an actress, the other an artist—we saw much of her art work in the home, including sketches drawn directly on window casings and woodwork of her room. Alcott’s father, Bronson, was a philosopher and educator (though his revolutionary ideas about education kept him from being successful in his day) and her mother was essentially what we’d now call a social worker, according to our guide. The home was simple and warm, and filled with many items that belonged to the family, since Orchard House had only one owner after the Alcotts, and became a museum in 1911.

Now back to laundry and sorting through travel ephemera and photos. Stay tuned next week for autumn leaves, historic houses and more!

Is it just me, or does September feel like a new beginning? Most of my life I’ve treated September the way most people treat January: as a new year. Even before I had a child going back to school or lived in Florida where the promise of the occasional cooler, drier day bumps up my energy, I reevaluated my life in the fall. My birthday is in September, so I think that adds to the “new start” feeling since like most of us I become more introspective around birthdays.

I’ve thought about starting my own Happiness Project, like Gretchen Rubin has written about in the book of the same name, and its follow-up Happier at Home (where the title of this blog post came from). I even began listing areas I’d like to focus on, but decided I’m not ready to attack things I want to change or enhance in quite that fashion. Planning all those months in advance felt too overwhelming to me. Instead, I decided to take baby steps and do some very simple things to get my new year off to a good start:

First, I’m keeping a time log this week to see where I’m spending my time. (I’m using this one.) From there, I hope to come up with a flexible schedule so I can get the important things done while still having time to play.

My weight has become a concern again, so I’m tweaking my eating and fitness routines to combat those creeping pounds.

I’m making plans for fun by figuring out the details of our postponed anniversary trip and scheduling some upcoming Field Trip Fridays.

I’m purging—the freezer, my closet, my file cabinet. I’m always battling stuff!

Even though it’s still blazingly hot here and it doesn’t feel like fall yet, I’m starting to feel more energetic, more likely to make some changes and explore new avenues. I’m ready to savor simple pleasures and take part in everyday adventures. Even though the calendar says September and not January, I’m ready for a new year!

Do you make any special plans in September? Are there any other times of year you evaluate life, set goals or take up challenges?