September, typewriters, and the changing of the season

September friends.

“But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favourite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.”  Stephen King, Salem's Lot

This is a much more poetic way to describe September than the key moment when I knew September was in full gear at our house.

We ate the last ice cream cones. 

You don't realize how much room a box of ice cream cones takes up in your house until September arrives. Suddenly, school snacks get top billing, you're buying brown sugar, and have no room for a giant box of cones that happens to hold just one or two cones. You finally say to the box:

"Get outta here!"

Just like that, summer is over. Swim suits are faded. The beach towels slowly make their way to the bottom of the pile in the linen closet. The beach sand is still here.

Because beach sand. 

But it is less and less the more we wipe and sweep.Today I went for a walk wearing long leggings on and was glad for it against the brisk morning breeze. 

Sayonara summer.

Our daughter is in kindergarten. There was a time when I was deep in the fatigue of toddlerhood and postpartum irksomeness when someone told me, "You just have to get her to kindergarten." This person happened to have 4 (FOUR!!!) toddlers of her own. (A two year old followed by triplets. Unplanned but a delight... or at least an adventure.) She used this mantra, "Get them to kindergarten."

If she could use it to calm down, so could I. And it did work. Five whole days of school all in a row. I feel like doing carpet angels on my living room floor every day at 8:45. But instead, I'm sitting down to send lightly illustrated typewritten letter out in the mail.

Harley told me I needed "a stallion of a machine" to really GET THERE. He didn't explain the THERE I was to get to, but there are whispers on the wind when I pull out one of my machines.

So far, I've done a lot of writing about typewriters. I just can't get over it. Remember that time I went on about Paris? That lasted 10 years. I don't think I'll be going on so much about the typewriter itself. There is a whole world out there to describe at the helm of a clunky word processor that thinks it's a classic car.

I've been pondering perfection.

With typos being a natural side effect of life with manual typewriters, I have been pondering the pursuit of perfection.I have come to the conclusion that perfection is overrated. Writing on a typewriter feels like one long run on thought, warts and all, and the writing is better for it. 

I wonder back to Paris, whether or not it would have been good to have a typewriter back then when I was describing this new lovely world.

But no.

I needed to become better at describing so I could become better at first drafts. With a typewriter it's ALL first drafts. Writing just one draft is like swimming straight across a lake rather than swimming around to the other side along the shore. There is no shallow end on which to rely. Even this blog post has taken me hours of editing. Shocking, I know. I have written forward and back, and have deleted as much as I have left on the page.

This is wonderful, of course, and I surely cannot imagine writing an entire book with a typewriter, but this is very different than living LIVE when typing up a letter.

Same same but different.

You know you're in love when you take fun photos of the subject matter in all manner of scenarios: Look at the autumnal splendour.