Back to school

Summer is over.
Well, not officially, but the major indicators are in place.
The lawn is getting brown.
The outside water dish is layered with walnut leaves and every time I blast down the driveway, my car tires launch walnuts down the street like lime green hand grenades.
My husband, a high school math teacher, returned to school this week. After a summer of work pants and shorts, I had to organize his school uniform of choice - khaki pants and knit shirts.
For the first time in eight years, he is coaching football again. It is also the first time he has coached football since we have been married. Our fourth anniversary is this month.
In the spring he spends a lot of time umpiring baseball games and is away from home a lot, but this is very different. Football invades his life all the time, not just when he is on the field with the kids.
He keeps a white board tucked under the coffee table. We'll be watching television - I am engrossed in the program and think he is too - and he'll whip that board out and start diagramming plays with black marker.
Once I looked over and he was doing the same plotting, only this time swirling his finger making invisible Xs and Os in the air.
We had a long talk before he made the decision to go back as an assistant coach. He tried to make it clear that he would be required to spend a lot of time away from home coaching, practicing, scouting other teams.
I thought I understood and I magnanimously told him that if getting involved in the game was what he wanted to do that I would stand by his decision. I now know that I truly did not realize what I was agreeing to, how much time he is and will be away from home and how that affects our life.
Football is in his blood. It has been a part of his life for probably 40 years - I bet he played midget football in West Virginia as a boy. His mom gave me the clippings that showed his was a standout high school player and that he earned football scholarships to play at JMU.
He went on to coach at three local high schools, serving as head coach at two of them.
I have never been clear about his decision to leave the game. He doesn't talk about it much. But he said that in his heart he knew that if the right opportunity came his way that he would get involved again.
The problem is that I'm not sure any woman can truly appreciate the core of football. We can love the game. We can know the stats. We can adore the players or the coaches. But football has an exclusive inner club, the price of admission paid by time spent on the field.
When he used to talk about football it was very different from how he speaks now as an active member of the club again. He told a local paper that on the field he feels like he hasn't missed a beat. I hear that in his voice.
And I know I made the right decision to support his choice to step on the field again.