Friday Night Lights

This is the time of year that the Florida weather me depresses me most.  I can handle January through August fairly well.  But once September hits, it's supposed to start getting cool and the air should be crisp and the leaves should start turning colors and there should be high school football games where we wrap our hands around bad hot chocolate to keep our fingers warm and I should be changing out the summer clothes for the winter clothes.

Instead, in Florida, we keep wearing our same flip-flops and shorts, t-shirts and tank tops.  We sweat through the day, and keep the air conditioning on through the nights.  We take our pumpkin spice coffee iced and we spend high school football games swatting away mosquitoes.  We look forward to the humidity decreasing down to 95% and hope the temperatures somehow manage to dip into the upper-80s instead of the mid-90s.  It doesn't happen, but we dare to dream.

I miss fall.  I miss the smells and the feels and the colors and if I think about it too long, I just get depressed.  So instead of wallowing, we took off for the beach Friday night to celebrate what we have rather than mourning what we do not.

We traded the Friday night lights of a high school football stadium for the bright light of the setting sun at Fort DeSoto Beach.

Instead of watching the birds start their migration south for the winter, we hung out with this guy, who graces us with his presence all year long.

We watched our boys run barefoot on the sand and chase our bird friends into the air,

and we watched them fly gracefully away.

We dipped our toes in the still-warm waters of the gulf and dug in the cool sand with trucks and shovels.

We listened as our boys ran towards the steps of an old fort, laughing and shrieking as they tried to catch each other on the empty stretch of sand, and appreciated the quiet of September in Florida when we who live here reclaim our land just briefly from the tourists who flood it in the summer and the winter visitors who start arriving next month.

We worked really hard to get to the top of the fort so we could have the best view...

...of this,

and this,

and this, 

and this.

So instead of being depressed that fall doesn't feel like fall here, I was happy just to be somewhere with these guys.

And I was grateful for different kinds of colors - those that paint the sky instead of those that paint the leaves.

And I realized that it's not the same in Florida, but fall is still beautiful here in its own way.