A Cool Wind Blows

I left school a little after 9:00 this evening, all of my students long gone with their carpools and neighborhood walking groups. I was the last to leave, as is often the case -- Sunny (our head secretary) and Terry (the boss's wife and my co-teacher) are anxious to get back to their families, and I am just as anxious to quickly finish grading the day's papers and update the gradebook before going home to unwind in solitude. (I've long since abandoned the idea of bringing home my "teacher work," and I prefer to keep it that way.)

So again tonight I shut off the lights, heaved the heavy glass door closed, and locked it shut. As the magnetic lock clicked into place, it dawned on me. There was a change in the air. The breeze scuttling around behind my back was a cool one. For a moment, I wished I'd brought along a sweater. Fall was on the wings. The dogged, miserably damp and heavy heat of summer was all but over... How has the time gone so quickly?

When I arrived in Korea, it was barely summer. I remember lying in the guest bedroom in my host family's 10th floor apartment, pulling the weighty cotton blanket over my ankles and toes as a cool breeze swept in through the windows and tiptoed across the floor. Within weeks, I had moved in to my own apartment, and was spending the wee morning hours kicking the bed covers as my dainty oscillating fan tried to keep up with the lingering, thick heat.

And now the changing of seasons is whispering again, and it seems impossible that an entire summer has slipped away without my scarcely being aware of it. It feels as though summer was somehow pulled right out from under me, though I know that can't be so.

It was just five days ago that my little brother flew back to Utah to start the fall semester at BYU, where he is working on his undergrad. It was just yesterday that my parents and baby sister pulled out of the driveway together, for the last time, heading north along the interstate taking them to their new hometown, on the outskirts of Boston. They're relocating just in time for Emily to start her senior year in high school. And it was today that the bulk of my students resumed Korean public school after a month-long summer break.

Change is in the air everywhere, it seems, stretching all the way from this side of the world to the other, touching even my roots back home. Change has been blowing through Seosan as I've had to say goodbye to yet another good friend who helped to make my first few months here memorable, and to several students I adore who have been admitted to EGA-II. And change will continue to keep me on my toes, I am sure, as the months march on. New friends to make, new students to teach, a new apartment to settle into, a new season to greet. Bring on September, I'm ready for another cool wind to blow...