Of course, your attitude toward September might have actually been a complicated thing colored by how nice your previous year’s teacher was or whether you could afford the “right” clothes or whether your best friend had moved away over the summer.

Still, most of us who teach have that sense of rising excitement at the end of each summer. If you are a parent sending your child off to school, you feel it, too. One of the privileges of school for both teachers and students is that we get to start over every year or every semester.

This clean slate leads us to believe that things can really change, that new things can happen—a helpful attitude in school and, really, throughout life. It’s productive and exciting to have a palpable sense of possibility.

When I first came to UCF in 2003, I had a bit of difficulty with this because the weather didn’t seem right. In the other places where I had lived—mild Tennessee, harsh Minnesota, and in-between Pennsylvania—there had been those cool evenings to signal that fall was coming. In Florida, my circadian rhythms didn’t line up, and I found it challenging to believe that fall term was about to begin.

Instead, the scalding days of August seemed to stretch interminably into September and even October. I struggled to find the lift in energy levels that had always come with cooler weather and fall term for me.

Eventually, of course, I adjusted. I began to see the subtle changes in climate as Florida would move into fall. The difference between 90 degrees and 80 degrees is significant, after all.

Because of a visit to Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary near Naples, where I saw an array of exotic (to me) birds, including painted buntings and wood storks (the sublime to the homely), I became aware soon after coming to Florida of the stunning bird life. I also began to watch for the birds that fly back and forth over Florida, stopping along the way, in massive seasonal migrations. A variety of hawks, falcons, herons, warblers, and thrushes, as well as waterfowl, flow through the state every fall.

Soon, I also began to appreciate the startling colors of fall flowering plants, even if we don’t have the bold leaf-changes of more northern climes. All you have to do is come upon a massive spread of blooming blue clock vine or wildly orange Florida flame vine or the vibrant purple of beautyberries, and you come to understand that fall here has profuse colors of its own.

This fall, however, some of us at UCF have a more blatant sign of possibility and change: the new Trevor Colbourn Hall, which some of us have already nicknamed “Trevor.” Over the summer, we cleaned out the old Colbourn Hall—named after UCF’s second president—and the first week of August we moved into the new, shiny one.

As with any change, there are some things we’re not crazy about and some things that will take a while to work out. But there’s also a little lift in most everyone’s spirits—exploring the building to find out where various offices and people ended up, helping each other with boxes and locks, chattering in the hallways like I haven’t heard in years.

Moving was a daunting task—we had 174 boxes for The Florida Review, and I brought home about 10 boxes of my own books because my new office is smaller than before. I ran into a senior colleague, drenched with the sweat of moving in August in Florida, when she was moving her personal items.

“How much do you have?” I asked.

“A lot,” she said. “I’ve been here a long time.” But even though she looked exhausted, her eyes gleamed with excitement.

Probably none of our eyes will gleam with tears when the old Colbourn comes down. It is slated for destruction within a few weeks. I’m sure there was the same kind of excitement when it was new that we feel now, but it’s a building that has lived past its time. The university decided not even to try to rehab it, but just to tear it to the ground. Some of us contemplated having a take-down party to watch the wrecking balls do their work. But we decided we didn’t really want to breathe that dust.

I’ve thought much in these days about an Idler essay written by Samuel Johnson in 1760, “Honour of the last.” He notes that “it is only by finding life changeable that we are reminded of its shortness.” A friend of mine in graduate school gave me a copy of this essay when she was moving from one phase of life to another, and I always have loved it for how it encourages us to face mortality in our daily lives, what now we might call practicing mindfulness.

No doubt, we will pause and perhaps share a moment of nostalgia for a place so many of us spent so much time learning, teaching, meeting, debating, making friends, making enemies, writing, advising students, filling out paperwork, snatching a bit of lunch at our desks, and many other tasks that make up a faculty, staff, or student life. I have one particularly fond memory of how, in my first year, my then-husband-to-be had an office on the fourth floor and would come by to see me on the third. I remember him peeking around the door frame to see if I was busy or could take a minute to chat.

There are memories in the old building, and, just as we start each school year with some regret that summer is gone, we will have to say goodbye to the old Colbourn. I hope we’ll all pause and reflect before we move on to the thrill of the new and fill our lives back up with possibility.

Awareness of death and awareness of life are, after all, inextricably entwined. The turning of the seasons always provides this reminder—if we notice.

Lisa Roney is an associate professor of English in UCF’s Department of English. She can be reached at Lisa.Roney@ucf.edu.

My grandparents had taken Virginia in after her mother died in the flu epidemic of 1918, a time that to me, even in the 1970s, seemed lost in the mists of the distant past. It stunned me that gray-haired Virginia had once been an 8-year-old girl whose mother died.

I may have been unusual, as not many children become fascinated by genealogy, but maybe you, too, had a favorite relative in your past. Maybe you, too, have joined in the recent boom in genealogy research going on. Maybe you’ve also thought about what all these family histories mean.

Virginia and Pat didn’t have any children, but she was a big family history buff, and sometimes would arrive with notebooks of family trees and photos of gravestones and long-dead ancestors. She explained to me how it was that she was 26 years older than my mother, her first cousin—she was the eldest of an eldest, whereas my mother was the youngest of a youngest child. She also noted that childbearing happened over long years for women of previous generations.

I pored over the records with her. My Grandmother Roney had done enough research to become a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, but it was Virginia who brought the past to life for me.

By the early 1990s, however, I was busy with college, then work, then graduate school, then work. I moved from Tennessee to Minnesota, back to Tennessee, to Pennsylvania, then to Florida. Virginia died, and her husband soon followed her. I never knew what happened to her expansive notebooks that had opened the door to so many family stories, perhaps even to my own propensity to weave such stories, fictional and not, into my work as a writer.

A couple of years ago, however, one of my graduate students, Judith Roney, who had the name by marriage, became convinced that I must be a relative of her husband, and she suggested I join Ancestry.com to try to figure out how. We never could—that connection must be distant at best.

However, Judith reopened Virginia’s world for me again. Right away, I got both of my parents (who are now divorced) to send me the records they had. These include a book written by yet another long-gone cousin about my maternal grandfather’s family history, as well as my Grandmother Roney’s family trees.

Madly, I began entering all this information into Ancestry and adding more via the little green leaf icons that indicate online records. Suddenly, I had more than 3,000 people in my family tree.

Perhaps you have done the same. It’s certainly a widespread craze—I jokingly tell my husband that online genealogy is the equivalent of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) for old people. There are plenty of similarities—it happens on an internet-connected computer, you meet lots of other people sort of, there’s always an interesting overlap between reality and fantasy, and it’s addictive.

For most of us, there’s always an imaginative element about these family histories. While there are strict genealogists—and I know a few of them—who painstakingly construct factual accounts of their ancestors, most of us take a few facts and wonder and guess and sympathize and suppose what life was like for those who came before.

Often what we find are indications of the same joys and sorrows we experience as mortal human beings today—births, marriages, graduations, travels and moves, fortunes gained and lost, illnesses, deaths. Sometimes we get a glimpse of poignant differences such as the once high rate of women’s and infants’ deaths at birth and childbirth.

One of my distant cousins—with the decidedly old-fashioned name of Finis Ewen Hogard (1880-1943)—lost his mother and baby sister at childbirth when he was 4, then lost his first wife and child in the same way, and the first child with his third wife at birth as well.

Evidently, there were some good years, as he went on to have six more children, and there’s an extant charcoal portrait of him, looking prosperous in suit and tie. Ultimately, however, he died in the poorhouse, without his family, of syphilis.

Such facts beg for embroidery—a detailed story of this man overcoming travail only to return to it. Genealogy offers us a scaffolding with which to support our sense of ourselves, our families, and the past. For now, I imagine Finis driven by his many youthful losses, roving the South, desperate for affection and for children, taking up with numerous women until finally one is strong enough.

Perhaps one day I will reach out to his direct descendants and learn more of the real story. For that is one important difference between online genealogy and MMORPGs—there are real, live relatives out there.

In fact, when I first enrolled in Ancestry, I feared encountering relatives who were out to prove the WASP purity of their heritage or even a ridiculous relationship to royalty. As a white southerner whose ancestors have been in the region a long time, I expected I would find past slave-owners and current racists in my family tree.

Fortunately, the first relatives that I have met online and then in person are quite the contrary. It turned out that some of my unknown cousins live in Miami, and I met three of them last year. The Scotch-Irish Campbell line, shared through our great-great grandparents, however, isn’t the main heritage of Geoff, Robbie, and Brett. Their grandfather married into an Ashkenazi Jewish family, and they and most of their relatives are Jewish.

We marveled over drinks how strange and marvelous that—for some unknown reason—the Tennesseans in our ancestral line seem to have been open-minded, egalitarian, and ahead of their times.

My newfound third cousins and I toasted to our good fortune in this regard. We talked about how, even part of the same generation, we are about 20 years apart in age.

And I reminisced about dear Virginia and about the fragility and strength of family, history, and story.

Lisa Roney is an associate professor of English in UCF’s Department of English. She can be reached at Lisa.Roney@ucf.edu.

Two years ago, the sago palm at the corner of my house bloomed. She hasn’t been the healthiest of plants, wedged in under the eave near the garage.

A few years earlier, my husband and I had hired a master gardener to put in some new flower beds, and I had asked her whether it wouldn’t be best to move the sago out from under the eave. She said no, though later I grew skeptical of that answer as the sago rose taller and taller. Now, she leans at a funny angle out from the house, and we have to lop most of the fronds off the side near the sidewalk.

We took the bloom as a sign of vigor. In the middle of the circle of spiky green fronds, surreal feathery, soft golden-yellow tentacles reached out in a wide swath. By the middle of summer, those feathers had formed a tentacled globe worthy of any science-fiction tale. We watched it form and change in fascination. It was stunningly beautiful and strange, and I marveled over it every time I pulled into the driveway.

But after the summer rains started to fall, the soft, golden globe collapsed, and I wondered whether the sago needed care. As a non-native gardener, I took to the internet, searching whether I should “dead-head” a sago the same way you do a host of other plants post-flowering. I found no definitive information, but several discussion boards noted that the sago would be fine whether cleaned up after blooming or not. I left ours alone.

I would stop by and check on the fading bloom—it flattened, then mostly sloughed off in the rains, leaving behind a mound of detritus that included some reddish lumps I understood were seed pods. Our sago is a batchelorette—there are no males nearby to fertilize her seed pods—and over time…well, nothing happened.

The next spring, I waited for the sago to put out her usual new fronds—an annual ritual I’ve always enjoyed. There’s nothing like watching a fern or palm frond unfurl. It feels like living in a series of time-release photos because the pace is rapid enough that you can see the change from day to day, but not so fast that you see actual motion.

Alas, what continued to happen was nothing. I trimmed a couple of dying fronds, but still no new ones appeared.

Another year went by, and this spring I renewed my search for information. Was there anything that could re-invigorate our palm? She still had a few spindly fronds that were yellowing at their bases, and by now her top looked crusty and brown.

Emboldened by one website that said it was permissible to remove dead seed pods, and that the pods could be poisonous to animals or children, I went out with my canvas gloves and raked them all into the yard-waste bin. Then I took a clipper and trimmed away the remaining debris. However, when it felt more solid than I had anticipated I checked the internet again and found a site that said, “Don’t trim sagos after blooming! You can ruin them, kill them, prevent them from growing.”

In despair, I confessed to my husband that we might need to just remove the venerable sago. We had tolerated her interference with the sidewalk, we had used insecticidal soap to keep down the aphids, we had nursed her, but she wasn’t in a great spot, and she didn’t seem to be coming back.

Then we had out-of-town guests, a long trip ourselves, and the busy spring academic season that means thesis defenses, final projects and performances, and all manner of things that occupy our attention.

One day, though, when I pulled out of the garage I was delighted to see, as if from nowhere, numerous stalks poking up out of the middle of the sago, about four inches tall already. It was as if they had appeared overnight, and they have continued to grow at a rate of about an inch a day. Any day now, these 30 or 40 new fronds will begin the beautiful, luxuriant process of opening, uncurling.

I can’t wait – not just for my sago, but for everyone: There are new fronds waiting to be uncovered and encouraged in all of us.

In the meantime, I am rerouting the sidewalk.

Lisa Roney is an associate professor of English in UCF’s Department of English. She can be reached at Lisa.Roney@ucf.edu.

In a way, I represent a trend. The U.S. Census Bureau has shown that the average age of marriage has been rising for decades. The census doesn’t identify the causes, but the average age has risen more for women than for men, so one speculation is that more women are going to college and putting their careers first. More generally, younger generations are more likely to be children of divorce and therefore approach marriage with more caution.

Nonetheless, the average age of first marriage for women is just 25.1 years and for men just 26.8 years. I say “just” because they seem awfully young to me, but, of course, throughout my 30s and 40s I frequently faced the question of why I wasn’t married. In fact, I withstood frequent drillings on the part of befuddled family, friends and even strangers. The inconceivability of my aloneness perhaps should have been a comfort—at least I had no obvious reasons that no one would ask, right?

I had given up on having children many years before. At the age of 11, my diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes came with dour-faced warnings in doctors’ offices and books that my parents should warn any suitor that I might not be able to carry off a healthy pregnancy. Even though the stats in this regard improved dramatically by the time I reached child-bearing age, I hadn’t been one to waste my time on fruitless pursuits, even as a child. With my steely eyed personality, I started early to plan other ways to make my life meaningful.

Of course, I wasn’t always alone. I dated, I shacked up, I broke up, then I started all over again. I never consciously marked marriage off my list of possibilities for my life, but like so many other single women, I lost my optimism. Almost everywhere I turned, another article would shriek the fact that past a certain age a woman’s chance of roping a man into a commitment dwindled. By the time I turned 40, then 45, I figured it would never happen and did my best to make peace with that fact.

I even tried an online dating site—the one with the complex couples-matching procedures purported to find someone just for you. In a five-state area, it found me exactly zero good matches, which I found hilarious even then. When you’re a weird girl, when you have a chronic illness, when you have a Ph.D., when you won’t give up your cats if a guy doesn’t like them—well, fuggedaboutit. I admit, I did have five cats.

It was around this time that I met Bruce at UCF faculty orientation. He was as new to Florida as I was and perhaps even a little bewildered since he came from Canada. We discovered that we shared academic interests, became friendly colleagues, then good friends. He first asked me out in the stairwell of Colbourn Hall, where we both had offices.

I said no—not because I didn’t already adore him, but because I was still in the process of extricating myself from a dating relationship that had not gone well. Bruce and I stayed friends, but it was another year or so before we had our first official date. It resembled so many other good first dates—mine, his, yours, dates at 15, dates at 20, dates at 35, at 65 or 70, dates of the widowed, divorced, and single—that awareness of one’s pulse, the intensified sense of smell that allows another person’s presence to be intoxicating, the blips of shyness, the connection that we so often compare to electric current.

I remember the moment, a few months later, that I thought I might marry Bruce.

On a sweltering summer evening, we had a dinner reservation at a trendy downtown Orlando restaurant where the parking was terrible. Just as we pulled into a spot, a woman started knocking desperately on Bruce’s car window. Immediately, he rolled it down. Huffing and puffing, the sweaty woman choked out that she was having an asthma attack and needed to get home to her oxygen. But she had missed the bus, and it would be another hour until the next one came. “No one will take me,” she gasped out.

Without any hesitation, Bruce told her to get into the back seat, and off we went, following her spare directions into the heart of the poorest neighborhood in town. Within 10 minutes, we had her to her door. Ten easy minutes that no one else had been willing to take.

Something I think of as mature love rose immediately through me that evening. I knew that Bruce was someone I could trust to do well by me and by the world we share. It’s not the love of 20-year-olds, or even of 25-year-olds, and I know that, strong as it felt, it might not have worked out for us. Although the statistics show a rising average age of marriage, they also show that more and more people never marry at all, by either choice or default. And Bruce had never lived with even one cat, after all.

I could just as easily have stayed single my entire life, and I never want to give false hopes to those who remain single and wish they weren’t. Let me say, though, that romantic love can happen at any age.

And I never want to make any single person feel as though the loves of their lives—their children from former relationships, their nieces and nephews, their family and friends, their pets–aren’t just as important as my love for my husband. They are. Maybe because I stayed single for so long, I know this as deeply as they do and value my friends, birth family, and pets intensely.

In February, this month of red hearts and sentimental expectations, let’s just say that any true love—and I mean the real thing—is good. Whatever its age, whatever its form, love is love.

Lisa Roney is an associate professor of English in UCF’s Department of English. She can be reached at Lisa.Roney@ucf.edu.