Where I’d rather be.

We’ve had a couple of blog posts lately on the end of summer and the beginning of yet another school year, another fall, another winter in the offing that we hope won’t dump us with a ton of snow like last year. And much as I am tempted to blog about the raw meat dress Lady GaGa wore to the MTV awards the other night, I'll leave that to those much better equipped to understand it.

In the meantime, it’s a beautiful sunny, late summer day here in Iowa as I’m writing this post. I’ve worked all day at my desk (10-1 deadline looming) wishing that I could have taken my laptop out on the deck to work and enjoyed what may very well be some of summer’s last gorgeous weather. But since the last time I used the laptop, it froze up on me and I lost 2 pages (yes, 2 riveting, pivotal, best-seller worthy, PERFECT pages that my subsequent attempt to recreate resulted in a mere shadow of their former brilliance - insert several colorful expletives here) I opted for working on the desktop.

Still, I spent a lot of time looking out the window today waiting for the muse to visit. Outside, the grass is still green, the flowers are still blooming – albeit not with the glory of their spectacular early and midsummer form. Clearly Buddy, the cat, is enjoying the flowers.

The birds are happily flitting about at our feeders and seem to be oblivious to the fact that not much more than a month from now they will be fluffing their feathers against a frosty wind.

The lazy black cat (also known as Sly, also known as Gummer because he has absolutely no teeth) is sunning himself in the window, enjoying a morning nap that stretched in to an afternoon nap that will no doubt ease into an evening nap due to the sheer exhaustion of holding down his favorite perch all day.

Keith Urban is singing a moody, bluesy song on XM radio about another summer that’s come and gone and I’m feeling nostalgic. (But you already guessed that, right?) I find myself thinking about other summers and wondering if it could possibly be THAT many years ago that we took that special trip, or went to that great new movie, or to the state fair … and I’m suddenly asking myself, if I could pick an age or a year that I’d like to go back to, what would it be?

In the end, though, as I sorted through those really fond memories, I realized that even if I could, I wouldn’t go back. Every experience – good or bad – has shaped me in some way, guided me, sometimes even led me by the hand to the place I am today. And most days, the place I am - friend, sister, wife, mother, gramma, author - is a pretty good place to be.

But, if I HAD to chose, it would be the summer I met my DH. I was a high school senior. He was a college sophomore. Mutual friends set us up on a blind date. We had just settled into the back seat of my friend’s boyfriend’s car (double date, ya know) and the first words he said to me were, “Want some candy, little girl?”

Needless to say, it turned out to be the first of many fun summers with that man :o)

How about you? Any summer memories you want to share before winter takes over our thoughts? Any place you'd rather be or something you'd rather be doing today that where you are?