A New Kind of Back-to-School Season

It’s mid-July, and I can already feel it. That familiar shift in the air as summer quietly begins its descent. Stores are filling with school supplies and calendars are inching toward August, when school starts here in South Carolina.

But this year, for the first time in decades, I’m not prepping for anything.

No sharpened pencils or lesson plans. No curriculum guides or circle time songs. Not even a backpack to double-check or a lunchbox to fill. This back-to-school season is passing me by in the most unexpected way.

Fall has always been my favorite time of year. Maybe because it feels like a fresh start. Maybe because I love learning. But mostly because I’ve always loved teaching - especially outdoors, where learning and wonder walk hand in hand.

In early 2025, I closed the doors to my nature-based education program and it came with a deep and lingering ache. I still wonder - who feels the loss more: me or the community that gathered under the canopy of our chestnut tree?

Now, instead of welcoming a new group of curious young explorers, I’m stepping into a new role - writing picture books, many of them nature-inspired and rooted in the same love of discovery that fueled my teaching.

There’s a bittersweetness in this season. I won’t be watching little hands capture lizards or helping tiny boots march through leaf piles. But I’m still here, still weaving wonder into the world, just in a different form. Admittedly, there is a lot of waiting in this process.

This August, as classrooms fill and buses roll, I’ll be writing stories for the children I used to teach and the ones I’ll never meet.

It’s a different kind of beginning. But it still feels like fall.

Because teaching may no longer look like acorns and mud pies - but the heart of it - curiosity, connection, wonder is still alive in me. It’s simply shifting from spoken word to written page, from lesson plans to picture books, from circle time to story time.

I’m not stepping away from the calling. I’m following it deeper.

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.”— Ecclesiastes 3:1

And this? This is the season for stories.