Here we are mid-October. My thirteen-year old nephew is playing fall ball, the fall baseball league for middle-school boys. On the league are all the boys who have chosen not to play football, and so my nephew is hitting clean up and batting somewhere in the 800's, at least according to his somewhat suspicious calculations. (He tried to explain to me how he got a triple in his last game without making contact with the ball or any errors on the part of the other team.)

My two youngest nieces, eight and five, are cheerleaders for the first time. The eight-year old cheers and though she does not seem to be the master of voice projection, she is proficient at the attitude and head-snap of much older cheerleaders. The five year old is really too young to cheer, but they put her on the squad as mascot and she has a sweatshirt and gets to shout and clap alongside the older girls.

My eldest niece, a junior in high school, does not leave her room without a book and a pen. The weather has cooled enough where I finally feel confident enough to put my window air conditioners in storage and an extra blanket on the bed. Mister President wakes up a half-hour earlier, prancing and anxious to experience the morning at it's chilliest. A sweater, thin jacket and scarf are adequate to keep one warm and stylish. That's all to say, things seem right and fall-like to me. Fall is good. Fall is great.

The next to last bus for Greenport leaves at seven o'clock on Friday evening from the corner of Forty-Sixth and Third Avenue. If you're lucky (and I was lucky), in a little under two hours and with few stops or much traffic on the Long Island Expressway, it drops you at the Greenport Train Station where you can buy a two dollar token from a machine to walk onto the ferry. The ferry fits two rows of about five cars with room for passengers along the rails and takes about ten minutes to cross over to Shelter Island. And so, with one small rolling suitcase and very little hassle, I arrived for the first time to Shelter Island on the Friday before the Fourth of July.

around Memorial Day, my business partner and I decided to change our work schedules. Instead of splitting each week down the middle—one of us working Monday and Tuesday and the other working Thursday and Friday with half days on Wednesdays—why not alternate weeks instead? One of us works one week, the other works the next. And so began my summer of endless vacation. Yes, I say this half complaining. I don't expect any sympathy, but one thing that's not easy to do when you have every other week off and a love for the beach is to write. And so here it is one week from Labor Day and I find myself without any summer blog entries longing for two things: a regular writing schedule and a new pair of kickass jeans. I really love jeans.

During triathlon training last year (which feels like a few lifetimes ago) a friend gave me a piece of advice before my first race of the season: when you're in the race, she said, keep reminding yourself about how good you're feeling, even when you're not feeling that good. Say to yourself, "Feeling good? Feeling great! Feeling good? Feeling great!" It sounds hokey, but it got me up and over some insane hills in those insane races. And I'm thinking of that today, not because I'm considering ever training or participating in a triathlon again—those days are long gone—and not because I need to push myself through back pain. I'm chanting that simply because, one week after back surgery, I'm not only feeling good, I'm feeling great.

It is almost two o'clock on one of my writing days--a day I do not go to Paragraph, but stay home and write. Right. In other news, my physical therapist gave up on me two days ago. Physical therapy was the last box to check for conservative treatments that might help (but did not help) relieve the pain from a large herniated disc that rendered me useless fifteen weeks and three days ago. Next week, I have appointments with a neurologist and a neurosurgeon. I wish I hadn't bothered checking all those boxes and was cut open, stitched up and recovering already, but my mother says I am not allowed to think like that. And I'm not. It's surgery time! And I can already feel my mood lifting at the prospect of getting this thing behind me for real.

Really, it is. I've cut down feeling sorry for myself in the early morning and late evenings. I'm even dreaming about traveling again thanks to a lovely reconnection with a friend I met traveling in Nepal years ago and an article in The New York Times about nifty farewatching sites. South America? Scotland? The Bahamas? There's no end to places you can go when you have aligned hips and a flexible schedule.