The Back to School Challenge

Two apples with ginger jar, 5x5"
on cradled gessoboard, $125.

This is "back to school" week on several fronts in my house. We are leaving on a redeye flight from LAX at midnight tonight to take my daughter to her first year at boarding school as a freshman in high school. She will, at age 14, be living approximately 3,000 miles away in New England, a far cry from her native coastal California. And I will, for the first time in as many years, be living in a house without a child. Change is inevitable; how it will affect us all remains unforeseeable.
This is also "back to school" week for me, as The Howard School starts up this week, so when I fly back to California in a few days I will be back in the classroom with my kindergarten through 8th grade students. I love my job and I love being surrounded by the creative energy, frustrations, successes, and joys of teaching art. This year in particular I will relish being around children, as mine will be so far away.
In addition to being back at school, I have accepted the "back to school" challenge from a fellow artist, Leslie Saeta (http://www.lesliesaeta.blogspot.com/) who has thrown down the gauntlet: one painting per day for the 30 days of September. More than 300 painters have accepted the challenge. I know I am already busy enough, but I am filling my calendar as full as I can, because I hope it will help me adjust to the changing seasons of my life.
So here's to September: for me, apples have always been a symbol of the season. Growing up in the Michigan, come fall we would go to the cider mills in the countryside surrounding Ann Arbor for cider and fresh, warm doughnuts (and always, yellow jackets all around). The farmers market would fill with paper bags and bushel baskets of apples, and chrysanthemums would start to appear in shades of yellow and rusty orange.
September here in southern California brings the best beach weather, the warmest ocean temperatures, and the end of the tourist season. We'll be heading down to the beach this afternoon for one last surf session and swim with my daughter before we drive down to Los Angeles for the transition to our new lives.
So here's to autumn, to apples, to changes. May we enjoy them all as best we can.