Hen on a hot griddle

I'm not sure if the expression in the title is just an Irish one, but it's how I feel tonight.
Summer's over, the evenings are getting dark and cold, and, to be honest, a melancholy has descended upon me. I can't settle to anything, I'm doing a bit of this and a bit of that. I'm cranky as hell, which is not like me at all.

"The summer's gone and all the flowers are dying, 'tis you 'tis you must go and I must bide".

Those words from the song Danny Boy keep going round in my head, like a funeral lament. And I feel like crying, for no good reason. I actually feel as though someone is going from me - maybe that's it, the carefree, no-time-constraints Mimi is being replaced by a busy, not-enough-time-for-everything, hassled person. I am also feeling the loss that I know will be there of not being able to blog or read other's blogs, as regularly as I do now. Things in this house are hectic during term-time, and there's no way I'll be able to spend hours on the computer.

School is back tomorrow, and tonight is probably my least favourite of the year. I love my job, love teaching, but I just hate the going back. I'm fussing around the daughters and son, making sure all their uniform stuff for the entire week is ready, hanging in their wardrobes. They've labelled all their books and got their bags ready. There is something of an air of anticipation with them, that thing of moving on and being in a more senior year.

But the feeling I have is more like foreboding. There is no reason to feel this way, and I know that once I walk in the door and see my friends, colleagues, everything will be fine. I know that I should be glad to have a job, in a school where I'm very happy. The students will come back from their long summer holiday, refreshed, ready to start a new year's work, delighted to see their friends again.And I'll be delighted to see them again, tomorrow.

And by tomorrow night all will be well again... I think. But for tonight, I'll put it in poetry:

"Time makes its relentless march
Like sand being pulled by an outgoing tide.
I stand helpless at the shore,
watching it move away from me,
knowing that stillness is not the way of the sea of life,
that seasons and years are the ebb and flow
that without movement there is no life.

But still I do not want it,
resist it in my heart at first,

then submit in the end to its power
shake off the resistance
and move with the flow, the endless flow".