Life comes in seasons — literally and figuratively.

There was a season when I ate lunch (if you can call a banana and some cashews “lunch”) in the pickup line because it was the only chance I was going to get all day to eat or to sit, and I was grateful for every second of it. Paper plates weren’t a failure of domesticity; they were a survival strategy. That season had a texture: cheerful chaos, exhaustion worn like a second skin, and a love so consuming it felt less like an emotion and more like weather.

The seasons of a life aren’t just the grand ones — childhood, launching, building — but the small ones too. The season when the sports schedule runs the household and you eat dinner at 3 pm and/or 10 pm.  The season when a nap in the car counts as self-care. The season when you are so needed, so constantly, that you lose track of where you end and everyone else begins. And somehow, in the middle of all of it, you wouldn’t trade a single paper plate.

I grew up in a season of soft landings. The baby of the family, I never had far to fall — there was always someone there, always an older hand reaching back. Then came the season of launching, when I discovered that the world was enormous and I was very small in it, and also that being small in a big world is one of the more thrilling things you can feel. That season had its own texture too: possibility and ramen noodles and the specific freedom of not yet knowing how things would turn out.

Then came the building season. Marriage. A house. Children. The pickup line. The paper plates. The three-year-old who whispered I love you in the dark in a voice so small and certain it could break your heart clean in two. I knew, even then, that I was living inside something irreplaceable. I tried to hold it. You always try to hold it.

And then, the way all seasons do, it shifted.

I know I will never feel a baby move inside me again. I’ll never watch my kids splash and laugh in a giant bubble bath.  I’ll never feel their tiny hands holding onto me as I lay with them in the dark.  I held onto it, and then it was gone the way the sweetest things always go; slowly at first, and then all at once. The loss isn’t quite grief.  It’s more like the ache that comes with knowing something was irreplaceable and that you were present for it, which makes it bittersweet rather than sad. It’s not as much a loss you mourn but a loss you hold.  An ache that lives alongside the gratitude, the way the first cool night of September lives alongside the last warmth of summer.

I have always said my favorite season is whichever one is coming up next. Not because I don’t love where I am — I do, I always have — but because each season carries its own climate, its own holidays, its own particular things to look forward to. The first fire of fall. The specific stillness of a snow day. The smell of sunscreen and the long, unhurried evenings of summer. I tire of the heat and I tire of the cold, and somehow that’s not actually a complaint.  It’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. I’ve always thought that a place where it’s sunny and 80 degrees every day sounds lovely in theory, but in practice it’s a little too “Groundhog Day” for me. I need the variety. And I think I appreciate those perfect days more because of the ones that aren’t.

Which brings me to the solstice.

The summer solstice is the longest day of the year and also a turning point. After that peak of light, the days begin to shorten again. It’s inherently bittersweet; a simultaneous arrival and departure, a moment that is both the fullness of one thing and the beginning of something else. And I have always loved that about it. It feels authentic like a clean beginning never quite does.

This is my solstice season. I can feel the shape and the shadow of what’s behind me with the wide open space of what’s ahead, both at once. There is loss in that but there is also something else: anticipation. The particular excitement of getting to know my children as the people they are becoming, not just the people I was raising. The freedom to ask, maybe for the first time in a long time, what I want the next chapter to look like.

A Polished Penny is part of my answer to that question. It is me stepping into a season that is finally, unapologetically mine — with everything I’ve learned from all the seasons that came before it, and enough light left in the day to see where I’m going.

Happy solstice. I’m glad you’re here for it.