I need something.  My enthusiasm is waning.

Why am I all of a sudden so bored of it all?  Trump.  Trans Mountain.  Climate change?  (In the old days, I’d get bored with it but nowadays young people say ‘bored of it’……which – me just saying that – is kinda boring, don’t you think?)

I think Sal is feeling the same way…….“Sweetie….we need to ‘do something’ like…oh, I dunno….let’s get on the motorbike and go for a ride?”

“That your inner biker-chick talking or are you channeling Nancy Moon?”

“I’d just like to, you know, let ‘er rip!  Take me through the trails and down to hidden places….that kind of thing.”

“The idea of a 70 year old zipping you through the forest so fast you scream out loud sounds appealing to you?”

“No!  DON’T GO FAST!”

“Have to.  It’s part of the deal.  Speed.  Getting airborn.  Leaping ditches.  Zoom zoom.  Engine screaming, biker chick screaming…..crashing, bleeding………all part of the deal……well, that and a picnic lunch, of course.”

“Well, maybe.  I guess.  But…………ya know….if Netflix was just better……I dunno……maybe it’s me…..maybe I just need to do a new quilt.”

“We have chores….?”

“Screw chores!  Sometimes a gal just wants to have fun, ya know?”

“I hear the opening dialogue in the next Charlie and Nancy book.”

It’s almost Fall.  The solar panel array soon gets adjusted.  The garden gets ‘put to bed’.  We actually DO the chores we need to.  We don’t buy to stock up anymore, we start to manage to ‘eat up’ what we have.  We are putting ‘closure’ on the season.  We begin to notice the changes in the weather, when the sun goes down, how many boats go by. What are the ravens up to…what are the neighbours up to?

We even start to harden up winter plans.

Fall/Autumn is weird for me.  It’s my favourite time of the year but there’s a quiet angst about it as the daylight diminishes, as the temperature drops.  In a sense, I have that old ‘back-to-school’ anxiety, that post Labour Day expectation of lifting bales and toting barges to a schedule.  Make a buck.  Keep appointments.  Pay mortgages.  THAT doesn’t happen anymore, of course, but I still have the inner clock…..

…..but not the inner energy that should come with it.  Weird.

I mention all this because there is an old, tumbledown, heritage building a couple miles up the way and the local regional district bought it.  They are likely to give it to us (the community organization) in some way (lease) and we’ll be expected to ‘save it’.   It’s a good plan.  It needs to be ‘saved’ and only locals can do that sort of thing.  Outsiders at market rates would take up a day’s wages just getting here and back.  It pretty much has to be us.

I have supported this idea (and variations on it) for years…maybe a decade…I am onside.  And I will help.  It is the ‘right thing to do’.  Exciting?  No….more in the ‘chore’ category.  And I am already thinking about energy…..weird….