Every once in a while I’m sitting in the car and just staring at the outside thermometer.
With “feel like” temperatures over 110 degrees, I’m eagerly awaiting the drift from summer’s oppressive heat to the cooler, mid-90s fall temperatures.
Maybe it’s just me, but, once the grass dies down to a veritable crunchy mess – I’m done with the summer season.
And I know it’s too hot outside when the pool water is over 85 degrees the entire time the sun is out.
It’s just not worth the sunburn risk to splash around in extra chlorinated bath water – or, at least that’s how I feel.
I can get the same experience inside the house, waiting for the shower to reach a semi-tolerable temperature for bathing since the pipes in the attic retain heat like nothing else!
Of course, just because the autumnal equinox falls on Saturday, Sept. 23 that doesn’t mean we’re going to get some astronomic decrease in temperatures.
Still, a girl can dream, right?
I mean, we’ve got Labor Day next Monday and once summer rolls out, it’s only a hop, skip, and jump to my favorite holiday of the year - Halloween!
In between that, there are homecoming games, the annual Rice Festival, my birthday, and a whole lot of prayers.
If you’re new to my opinionated corner of the paper, let me give you a massive but quick recap of why I’m praying so hard for this fall and all the events it encompasses.
Last year, I managed to accidentally break my leg the day after summer ended.
I spent pretty much the entire fall, winter, and most of the spring hobbling between a wheelchair, knee scooter, casts, braces, and boots up until my release from my doctors just before Easter this year.
That means I missed everything that I usually love about the fall and have been promptly obsessing over this year’s possibilities.
I mean, usually, all I personally really care about is my birthday and Halloween fun – but this year, it’s almost like a passion compulsion to plan out those other upcoming events and plan how to attend almost all of them.
At the same time, I’ve been working on my overall health to prevent a repeat of last year’s debacle from occurring once more.
Though you can’t exactly be prepared for accidents like that, the ‘broken leg journey’ experience has made me extra careful all the same.
Plus, it does leave me with a bit of wisdom that runs against the theater-kid part of my brain.
In case you didn’t know, ‘break a leg’ is a typical English idiom used in the context of theatre or other performing arts to wish a performer ‘good luck.’
An ironic or non-literal saying of uncertain origin, ‘break a leg’ is also commonly said to actors and musicians before they go on stage to perform or before an audition.
I can confidently say that after having broken my leg, this idiom is no longer in my vocabulary at all.
In fact, I never cared for the saying when I used to perform in show choir during my high school days.
And ever since last September’s painful experience, I refuse to use the idiom.
My go-to encouragement phrases are ‘good luck,’ ‘best wishes,’ or ‘may the odds be ever in your favor’ – the latter comes from the wildly popular Hunger Games book series.
