cool winds and checkups

Started the day early, the kind of morning where the light slants just right and the air carries a whisper of cooler times ahead. A string of doctor visits had me pinging across town—one stop, then another, and another still. Everyone kind, mostly. Long waits balanced with short conversations. Questions asked, vitals taken, a nod here, a hmm there.

There’s something about medical errands that wears you out differently—not dramatic or loud, just a quiet drain that settles in the shoulders. I’m feeling it now. A little wrung out. Tired and sore.

But the weather helped. Cooler today, like the first leaf of fall might peek out if you looked hard enough. The kind of breeze that doesn’t push, just glides by and lets you know things are changing. No crunch underfoot yet, but it’s coming. I can feel it in my back.

Home now. Cat curled up beside me like she’s guarding the perimeter. I’m looking forward to more days like this—less the appointments, more the cool air and slowing down. The edge of summer is softening. Autumn is lining up backstage, waiting for its cue.

#windingdown
#coolbreeze
#almostautumn
#longdayquietnight 🍂

Drove over to Crystal Spring Market this afternoon. Just wanted a few things—vegetarian curry rice for me, a turkey sandwich for my date, mineral water, and some chocolate chunk cookies for later. Ate the curry at the window inside the store, watching the slow rhythm of the neighborhood shuffle past. No chickpeas, no sweet potato, just rice and sauce—plain and grounding.

Book club met in the evening, though there were far fewer folks than usual. Summer colds, the lack of a light fiction book, or schedule tangles, maybe, or just the pull of a quiet Monday. We gathered anyway, circling up to talk about Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green—a nonfiction dive into how disease doesn’t move evenly through the world. How race, poverty, and systemic neglect decide who suffers longer, who gets overlooked, who’s left in the waiting room too long. No easy answers, just a lot of hard truths strung together with clarity. A few of us sat with that silence you get when a book says something you always knew, but didn’t have the words for until now.

Afterward, my date and I shared the cookies back home. Soft, just enough chocolate. A small sweetness at the end of a dense day.

The cat blinked at us like we’d come back from something important. Maybe we had.