August 2025 ends soon. Summer’s over, and school has started. I saw the yellow buses on the road this morning.

It’s been a hot summer. I’m more than ready. Officially, September 1 marks the beginning of the meteorological fall season, and the autumnal equinox occurs on September 22, 2025. Our days will be shorter and cooler.

Every year at the end of August, this one-time schoolteacher becomes a little nostalgic. Not that I’d like to be back teaching in a classroom again. I’m quite content to be home writing my stories and publishing books.

Once the back-to-school chatter begins, I can’t stop a part of me from missing the excitement of setting up my classroom and seeing the eager young faces on the first day of school.

I swallow the lump of memories in my throat whenever I spot a school bus and pause to send up a prayer for a “really good year” for the bus driver, the kids, and the teacher waiting in their classroom.

Back-to-school this year meant two great-grandchildren headed off to big school. One to Pre-K and the other to Kindergarten. Seems only yesterday I watched their mother, my granddaughter, go off to big school.

The end of August signals more than back to school, though. It’s the freshness of new beginnings.

A time of changes.

A mid-year New Year’s Day.

I’m looking forward to the new season. What about you?