New Year's Day, or Something LIke It

I always feel like Labor Day is New Year’s Day.
So this is the day after New Year’s Day, when the holidays are over and it’s time to move seriously into a new year. The age of summer fun ends abruptly.
Of course there’s something about September, still the official back-to-school season. Even if my niece and nephew in Florida returned many days ago to school. There’s something, too, about the fall itself. The kickoff of the big season, especially in New York City, where we gear up for what a friend reminded me this morning is her favorite season. And probably her favorite season in the city. The “When Harry Met Sally” part of the year, as she reminded me. The glorious color. The end of the awful heat. The beginning of the theater season and the TV season and the movies not necessarily produced solely for 13-year-old boys.
With it all, though, comes a responsibility I can feel on my shoulders. Time to get going. Surely this is the time to fix everythin and clear things out, from the stacks of crap on my desk to the extra hair products in the bathroom. It’s time to make a few tough financial decisions about the future, add an extra day at the gym each week and somehow think short-term, medium-term and long-term. All simultaneously. That’s a hell of a to-do list, and so yesterday I spent a couple of hours shifting the lists themselves from a Word document to my Google calendar.
This is when I expect a lot of myself. Maybe too much. And perhaps that’s why, amid all the to-do lists, I want at this time of year to come up with a vacation schedule too. To have some labor-free moments to look forward to during these days just after Labor Day.