The Things You Miss

It's fully September now.  Yesterday was the first nice bright day in a little over two weeks, and it feels like somehow during that grey, drizzly fortnight the season changed from summer to fall. I know the retailers felt it, because all of the sudden we're into the rich and muted colors of the fall collections. The trees felt it too: the London plane trees, so bare when we first arrived, so green and leafy betimes, have now begun to shed. First a few, nearly unnoticeable dry leaves skidding about. Now the light is thinner somehow, and a little wan, but it filters through the baring branches nonetheless.

Some part of me feels cheated. I don't feel like I've had a summer to speak of. I know that's empirically, emphatically untrue, given that I've been on "hols" this entire time, and that I spent a full week sweltering in a shop in Old Street, and another week sweltering in Spain, and another week cruising the Mediterranean. But those are active summers, summers without rest, summers that do not allow for such things as relaxing and taking in the views or resting a weary mind.

Besides that, I've missed all of my usual signposts of the turning year. These are the things that make me feel that Time Is Passing (tm) and without them I feel as if I'm in a shiftless limbo.  I've missed May Day, two weddings, the Alameda County Fair, the whole entire 4th of July pyrotechnics season, costume college, a handful of Odd Salons and innumerable dances, picnics, and parties.  As I type this - 10am London time, 2am Pacific - most of my friends are enjoying a final evening after the Temple Burn before they begin the process of teardown, return, and reacculturation post-Burning Man.  I didn't expect to miss Burning Man as hard as I currently am.  And that's not quite all - the Gatsby Picnic, which I attended for the first time last year and which I adored, comes hot on the heels of Burning Man. After that, Much Ado About Sebastopol, one of the few Renaissance Faires that I'll attend with gusto - also while we're still here. And Folsom Street Fair happens just before we return so I'll be missing that too.

I feel as if I'm scraping together spilt sand when I say I'm planning to make the closing weekend of the Northern California Renaissance Faire, hoping to hit Burning Man Decompression, and will definitely be going to Le Bal des Vampires. But right now I'm a little lonely, a little depressed, and extremely temporally dislocated.

As a salve, we've been trying to knock things off our touristy "to see" list, and we've been churning through theatrical shows and day trips. This weekend we got through eight things: The Banqueting House (free as we're Historic Royal Palace members), The Ben Franklin House, a trip to Harrod's, and a pub called The Grenadier, then yesterday we caught the Changing of the Guard, went down to Greenwich and saw the Painted Hall and the Observatory, then came back upriver and rode the London Eye.

We live in an area that is below the Heathrow flight path, though not in the window-vibrating sense that I remember from South City or San Jose. But every time I go outside I see a plane arcing overhead towards the west, and some part of me counts the weeks, the days, until that plane is coming for me, coming to take me away from this adventure and bring me home.