I woke up this morning to the sounds of a very rollicking summer thunderstorm. Lovely, really. But because I have, shall we say "fluffy?" hair, my thoughts turned to whether this rain was going to continue through the morning. So I looked up the weather for today. And then I saw the weather for tomorrow. The last saturday in August. Highs in the 80s (which in South Carolina is positively fall-like).

And I started bawling. Correction. I am still bawling. As I am typing this.

Where did this summer go? How is it possible that it's the end of August, and I've only taken my little boy swimming twice? I feel guilty and a little cheated. But I have only myself to blame. (Yep. Still bawling.)

It's not that we haven't had a lovely summer full of fun things. We have. It's just that swimming is my summertime thing. I look forward to it every year like a little kid. And then every year, as the summer is ending, I invariably feel that I haven't gotten to swim enough. This year, more than ever. We don't live near a pool, and for all of my love of swimming, I'm a little phobic about the beach. But if I made time to do it, we could easily drive to my mom's house about 45 minutes away and swim in her neighborhood pool. I just haven't made time.

Why?

I talk about my kind of crazy life on this blog, and I think I make it sound kind of romantic and glamorously over-scheduled. And that's not disingenuous. I think that my life is pretty darned cool. I have a fantastic husband and an amazing child, not to mention a loving and wonderful extended family. I get up in the morning and go to work as a lawyer, giving my voice to people who would otherwise have none. The work is hard—it's time consuming and emotionally draining. But I care about my clients, and I love (I mean love) my coworkers. After my son goes to bed I get to design fabric and draw and write stories and read books. And, starting this week, two nights a week, I get to go to my law school alma mater and teach a new group of students what I have learned; I have dreamed of this opportunity for years, and so far it's just as good as I'd hoped.

But at the end of a week full of all of these good things, here I am sitting at my computer at 6:30 in the morning boo-hooing about what I haven't done. Because as much as I try to trick myself into believing otherwise, it's simply not possible for a person of even moderate imagination and passion to do and experience and accomplish every notion worth pursuing. Eventually, trade-offs have to be made. This summer, I have traded sun-drenched afternoons of swimming and wrinkled fingers for a combination of other indulgences and more pressing responsibilities.

I use this blog to tell stories, to share my creative process and product, to say "look at me!" But I also use it as a touchstone. A place where I come to reacquaint myself with...myself. As E.M Forster said, "How can I know what I think till I see what I say?"

So what do I think? I think that I probably need to slow down. But I don't really know how. I don't know if I even want to. Right now I think I'm just treading water. I know that what I don't want is to look back five years from now and realize that I had my priorities all wrong. Maybe what I really need is a sunny afternoon floating on my back to figure it out.

This weekend I spent about 3 hours alone in a doctor's office pondering my own mortality. Well, really, most of that 3 hours was spent pondering the unspeakable horror that is my skin tone in the cruel pall of flourescent lighting. But, my mortality, it was pondered.

See, I have been having this weird not-quite-dizzy-but-definitely-not-normal malaise for the past few weeks. A normal person would probably have done one of two things if confronted by this feeling: 1) beat feet to the doctor in order to rule out anything serious or 2) waived it off as just one of those things and gone about her business. I did neither. Work has been relentless for the last few weeks, so finding a way to accommodate the incomprehensible schedule my doctor keeps was out. And, because I am an inveterate hypochondriac, just waiving off this feeling—which is something akin to the feeling you get when you drop from a great height—was also decidedly out of the question. So, as is my habit, I chose the path of greatest resistance: persistent worry, with no hope for a logical, practical resolution. For two weeks, I called my situation "vertigo" and told everyone around me to chill out, while I silently contemplated my living will.

Finally, on Saturday, after no small amount of prodding, I dragged myself to the doctor (not my regular doctor, but a very nice urgent care place that takes my insurance). I hoped for something simple, like a clogged ear, but I feared something serious, like, say Ebola. Well, I didn't really fear Ebola, but the things I did fear all sound too embarrassing to admit now. Ebola is a lot less hysterical than what I had in mind.

If not Ebola, then what?

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The surface of ye olde blogge has been rather still lately, but there is much busy-ness just below. Soon enough, I'll be able to show off some new, nifty stuff of my own, but in the meantime, I thought I'd take a minute to wax poetic about some things that have been knocking my socks off lately. 

We bought Doodles at Lunch: 36 Tear-Off Placemats after flipping through it for about, oh, 10 seconds. Remember Ed Emberly books? You know, where you drew about 100 different animals all from your thumbprint? Those were the tops when I was growing up. But, well, Ed...move over because Deborah Zemke's 36 doodles knock the old Emberly way outta the park. What I love about these suggested doodles—aside from the fact that they achieve remarkable realism with a minimum of drawing, breaking each doodle into its fundamental shapes—is that each doodle is built from a letter of the alphabet (or a number, thus 36 doodles, rather than 26), AND the letter of the alphabet that is the basis for the drawing is also the first letter of the item being drawn. My favorites: The sideways E's that make the feet of the Elephant and the two lowercase N's that make the head and body of the Newt. My son and I spent well over an hour one afternoon drawing and re-drawing these doodles. He opted for markers, while I chose my favorite black Staedtler pen and watercolor pencils. Rather than drawing on the pages themselves, which are intended to be pulled out and used as placemats, we each worked on our own large sheet of paper so that we can practice these doodles over and over. We were both very happy with our work—for someone who designs constantly in spite of significant insecurity about drawing, I found this really satisfying. I plan to track down some of her other titles for even more fun. 

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