It's that time of year when I wake up with a shiver, giddy over the chill in the air and that smell of autumn that may or may not exist outside of my own imagination. I put on a scarf or a sweater, make coffee, and proceed to ignore the afternoon as it warms up, because it's still summer, but I'm ready for it to be fall.

I was running this morning and it was a damp and comfortable 60 degrees, but the sun was shining on parts of the sidewalk and I thought about how amazing it is that I could be running in Virginia (in Farmville or Roanoke or Charlottesville), or I could be running in Minneapolis, and although I am not the same person I was seven years ago, I can feel almost exactly the same at this moment that I did at that moment.

I made a turn on a new loop and was surprised by the smell of coffee coming from a shop on the corner. The coffee shop is right by our apartment building, but looking at it from a different angle; coming at it from a different street, startled me. It looked different, and I felt disoriented. I'm still getting to know my new neighborhood.

It reminded me of the time my old roommate Caroline, our friend Maggie, and I sat on the steps of a building on Longwood's campus before classes started our freshman year. I remember the cold roughness of the cement steps and the sort of horizontal platforms that jutted out on either side, and how later, one afternoon, I walked past that building on my way to something like I always did and realized that it was the same place we had sat that late summers night, weeks before.

I have moved almost every year since starting college in 2006, and each time, it has been at the end of a summer. August awakens a nostalgia in me, and I want to start over in some way every time autumn nears.

The promise of unfamiliar corners becoming ordinary fixtures is something I like. Settling in feels good.

When I first started my job last year, I impulsively bought a little potted succulent to place on my desk at work. I was standing in Kroger, and I don't remember what I had actually popped in to buy, but I remember that on the way to my car, I got caught in one of those torrential rain storms that seem to come out of nowhere from April until July in Virginia.

The succulent looked like a dinosaur. I'm not one to see a plant and think I have to have that, but I picked it up because it reminded me of a stegosaurus and made me smile, and because I was feeling really hopeful. It was summer, and Rob was home, and I was feeling less like a student and more like an adult (and enjoying the transition).

After about six months and too much watering and not enough natural sunlight, the soggy little succulent died. I took it from my office and stuck it in that magical windowsill, vowing never to water it again. The plant continued to die, but not before sprouting a hard, purple-ish little bud in between two grey leaves. I picked it off, abandoned the old plant, and placed the baby one onto new soil.

Lots of things have changed this year. I don't know if the new plant will thrive or struggle or walk the line between the two, but it's beginning to put down roots, and it's good.

I went on a run yesterday; the kind where it's muggy and hot outside and you think about huge things while you lose your breath and sweat quickly covers your body. I told myself to run twenty minutes, and I started fast, and then thirty minutes passed, and I told myself to run some more.

It was hot and the sky looked like thunder and my legs felt like bricks and I just kept going. I didn't start out with grand thoughts about life, because I started out with basic thoughts about running, but the former evolved from the latter because that tends to be the way it works when you're running.

I started going to CrossFit last summer and I continued for about two months. During that time, I stopped running because most of the time I was too sore to run, and when I wasn't too sore to run I felt too strong to need to run. It was fine, and then I stopped going to CrossFit, but I kind of had already stopped running, so for a while I was just sort of lazy. When I finally started again, I never pushed myself to the caliber that I used to in my cross-country days, and certainly not to failure like I often did in CrossFit.

I got so comfortable that I forgot what the edges of my comfort zone felt like. But I like being in that space. I need it.

Here's to finding that line, and then walking on it.