One of the things that I’ve grown to semi-enjoy is a soccer game thanks mostly to my nephew’s participation in the game. He’s graduated to varsity this year, and the Amsterdam High School Boys Team is doing a fundraiser until September 26, 2025. If you’d like to help them out, here is the link to donate; every amount you might spare is appreciated.

We attended a scrimmage this past weekend, and on the big field it was a lot more exciting than the games we’ve been going to at Afrim’s (though that’s a lot closer than Amsterdam for us). It was a sunny late-summer day – the banks of fluffy clouds provided comfortable shade while the game was a good one ending 2-2 (I guess ties are allowed in soccer? I don’t know – after all these years I’m still learning the rules.) Once again, if you want to support the Amsterdam High School Boys Soccer team, please click here and put yourself on their scoreboard. Go Rams!

It may be time to start elongating my daily meditations – a habit I’ve employed previously, especially when the day’s light grows shorter. This seems like a good starting point for September, said to be a banner month for Virgos as we have a solar eclipse on September 21 – just in time for the new fall season. Let’s take a deep breath then, and take stock of this particular present moment.

I was supposed to be in Boston with the twins this weekend, but despite checking with them and confirming multiple times, they still ended up having to cancel due to sport practices or something. It’s been the way things have gone lately – they missed the last few holiday trips to Boston, this spring’s Take Your Kids to Work Day, and I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve invited them over in the last few months with no response. I’m assuming this is the way of teenagers, and nothing to take too personally.

I light a candle from which I will burn a stick of Palo Santo, and its reflection glows in the window looking out into the front yard – a visual trick that somehow still works in the middle of the day. There is magic everywhere when you pause to observe.

Starting September in thoughtful fashion feels like the right place to begin this month of transition. There is some soul-searching to be done – and September is the ideal month to recharge and reinvigorate such spaces. A Virgo leans into fall cleaning with gusto and verve. We love ridding ourselves of excess nonsense and creating a place of peace and calm, and we aren’t afraid to move forward in that pursuit.

Recapping the week I turned fifty seems an apt moment to celebrate the silver-haired circumstances that surround my aura-farming of late. It’s also a good time to pause for a Monday morning blog recap – just because it’s a holiday doesn’t mean the blogging stops here. If anything, we go harder, faster, better, brighter…

A late summer refresher.

Farewell to the 40’s.

Our lone Dazzler of the Day was Austin Butler. (A shirtless Austin Butler, if that helps.)

The brain drained.

A way-back reminder.

‘Tis still the damn season of the Virgo.

A new slant come the end of summer.

A most humble and magnificent flower.

Chris Evans in a jockstrap.

A favorite gift at 50.

Downtown Albany to the core.

I think I’m finally beginning to understand Cher.

Who wants candy?

Ropes of sugar, bracelets of candy.

She’s made of candy.

Candy everybody wants.

Candy perfume boy.

The rose at the end of August.

June roses are vastly different from August roses.

In June, all is hope and tenderness and promise.

In August, all is rich and resonant and ripe.

Most people prefer the rose in June – and most of me would agree – but one small and important part finds greater beauty in the August rose. They glow differently, because they know they are the last. They are sadder, and sweeter, for it.

Many garden perennials throw out a few blooms before fall arrives in earnest, and though they are usually smaller and less robust than their early summer counterparts, their colors feel richer and more vibrant. I’ve always felt for them a little more.

The end of August is always sad.

There have been a number of notable gifts that I’ve received/begged-for over the years: a Laser Disc player back in the 90’s (which was the only format in which Madonna officially released her Blonde Ambition tour, and the sole reason for me wanting it) that my parents found at Radio Shack one Christmas, a Louis Vuitton Keepall 50 that Andy got me for another Christmas many years later, a small painting that Suzie did of me decades ago that was slightly reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream, and this delicious bottle of Diana Vreeland perfume that Sherri and Skip found on one of my wish lists.

For my 50th birthday, Sherri and Skip gave me what may very well be the best gift of the year, and I don’t mean the pair of precious Hermes fragrances that was part of their offering – it was a box of 50 little colorful notecards in individual envelopes, each with a memory or musing or moment written on it that went back over the past twenty years of shared friendship and office adventures. To say that I was touched, this year and this birthday especially, is an understatement, and I can’t thank them enough for such a meaningful and poignant gift.

While I was tempted to tear instantly into all of them – and started off doing just that with the “Imagine Dragons” card (a very private joke) – I slowed down to savor each one, going over the memory or moment that was mentioned, and smiling or laughing at the thought of it. That sort of warmth and love is not something I wanted to end so quickly, so I paused about halfway through, choosing to open a few each day for as long as they last.

Even better is the idea that once I make it through them this initial time, I can put them away for a darker day, bring out this lovely box, and revisit such happiness again. Sherri and Skip have often provided a reassurance of my dwindling belief in the goodness of people – and it’s still there, especially in the people I am lucky enough to call friends.

Behold the humble and somehow magnificent common daylily. Seen proliferating along roadside banks, the daylily is one of those overlooked gems often maligned for their steadfastness and reliability, yet entirely capable of putting on an exotic show. If these were as rare or delicate as a bird of paradise, especially in these wintry parts, they would be celebrated just as grandly. Alas, we do not reward or appreciate the steadfast and reliable, only the problematic and difficult. It goes against reason or what’s righteous, and illustrates the impossible fickleness of a world designed to cause as much hurt as possible.

Refusing to extoll or praise such noble traits is sadly the way of this world right now, but as long as I have voice and space in which to use it, I’ll keep on plugging the magnificence in something as common as the daylily, even if the blooms lasts but a day. Beauty is as eternal as it is ephemeral, and nothing proves that more than a flower that lives its entire life in a single day. We should all endeavor to live like that.

It may be time to start normalizing letting coleus go to flower, at least if we are being blessed with this almost-blue shade of brilliance. I’m the first one to espouse pinching coleus back hard in the beginning – it creates for a bushier plant with a stronger multi-branching infrastructure, and way more leaves – but by this time of the year, let the plant have its full life-cycle before the first hard frost of fall finishes it off. Some people continue fertilizing and pruning and insisting on the show going on full-throttle until the last possible moment. I find comfort in seeing the natural die-back of the garden starting about now. We need the rest, we need the respite, and we need the winter.

But before that, let’s sneak in a few coleus blooms as they are so stunning against their more-celebrated foliage.