Hottest summer ever and suddenly, autumn.
Small doe nosing around the stubble of a harvested cornfield as traffic zooms past on the freeway.

I remember doing this with you, I tell my oldest daughter. It seems like last year, not eight years ago. It honestly does – her first day of school. I wear a teeshirt under my office shirt but still feel the chill. Rotten apples lie on the sidewalk. Up ahead her mother walks, further up other parents and at the front, the little kids starting school today, with their teachers. Her little sister and another girl are holding their teacher’s hands as they walk.

The little one has been so excited she’s slept poorly for the past several nights. She’s said she’s looking forward to it, but this morning she admitted being scared.

We all walked her to school this morning. New room, stuffy, full of parents and new first-graders. Most know each other from their local nursery school. Our daughter is one of a few outsiders. Like the other kids, she introduced herself to the teacher, shook her hand, gave her the picture of the school she’d been asked to draw, and sat down at one of the two-kid tables that filled the room. No one else sat down next to her.

She sat there waiting patiently, a little girl in glasses wearing her best dress, shoes polished, alone. The teacher seated children as they came into the room, but left our kid alone although she was sitting near the front. Needless to say, she got off on the wrong foot with us.

Then everyone marched out of school to the local church for a school mass. Every school in the country does this on the first day of school. So much for the separation of church and state in Austria. The little kids gathered in front of the church, we went to the back. We were among the last, so we went to the last pew. My wife and daughter got seats, I stood because a lady was saving a seat for someone who never showed up. Then, when everyone was taking Communion I left for work.