These window pictures always feel so dramatic, but really I just like the light. It’s like you look up and all of sudden the LEGO book is there in color, and the blankets shine with the light of the sun. The only thing that showed up with the bloodwork in the summer was low Vitamin D, which is something that’s been low for the past almost four years. He wanted to check it again in three months, which ended up being more like four.

It went up by three points, which makes me wonder, was it always low? Is there something that keeps my body from absorbing it? The chiropractor tests from way back last April said I was immunosuppressed and that my batteries were only charging halfway (his words). They’re not like actual medical tests, so I didn’t know how much confidence to place the conclusions. One of the tests we’ve never redone. The other I requested to do over last November, which came back almost unchanged from the first.

I talked to my sister on the phone this morning. She said she was coming out of her cave and was ready to talk to humans again. It’s a definite thing, the pulling away and going silent, the withdrawing in order to come back free. Most of the leaves have fallen now, with the exception of the honeysuckle and a version of oak trees which always hang on longer. I rested a bit this afternoon, before heading out again tonight for class.

(Sometimes I just don’t know what to title these)

How firm a foundation, O saints of the Lord
Is laid for your faith in his excellent word
What more can he say than to you he has said
Who unto the Savior for refuge has fled
~How Firm a Foundation, LSB 728~

“Mom there’s nothing worse than having to write out long definitions.” He said it with a boyish matter-of-factness that made me laugh, that made me forget, if only for a moment, about winter and darkness and 15-page papers. But there he was, across the room in his chair, and I on the living room couch with my blanket, waiting for a returned again weakness to pass. I like it here, when afternoon time comes, when the boys return home with their backpacks and stories.

In the early weeks when school had started, they set their alarms one day for 6:30. Going through some sort of childhood freedom withdrawal, they made a fire and played in the backyard until 7, the time when they now regularly have to get up. It’s not like they even slept much longer before, but I guess there is a difference between casually rolling out of bed, eating breakfast in your pajamas with nowhere to go, versus having to be out the door by 7:30. I don’t mind the routine.

This time of the year the leaves actually fall, gently like snowflakes except that they’re leaves. The acorns and walnuts had their time and are done. One year it rained acorns, for almost two weeks it sounded like rain. The peak autumn colors have passed, which usually happens after a rain somewhere. Many people have commented on how beautiful the trees have been this year, and I have to agree with them. They say it depends on the temperatures and the timing of the rains.