Summer ends. Balance without romanticism.

Twenty-five weeks of WiseTip. The newsletter began on March 7th, in the middle of a banking crisis nobody had fully predicted. It continued through spring equinox and Earth Day and Easter and Eurovision and Cannes and D-Day and Victor's first letter and Marian's default mode network and Alex's Fourth of July and Barbie and Oppenheimer and Maui.

I want to do a balance, but without the romanticism that tends to creep into balance-statements. Not: this summer taught us important lessons. Not: these were beautiful weeks of family connection. Here is what is actually true:

My son is better at tolerating boredom than he was in March. The pulley system in my parents' barn still exists. The Lego thing is still on his desk, added to. The drawing from the iPad incident is still on the fridge. My daughter has had one conversation about marketing, one about nuclear weapons, and one about what it means to be a woman — none of which I would have predicted in March.

The conversation about nuclear weapons was the one I most didn't plan. That one started from a film and went somewhere I hadn't expected, and it's still going, and I don't know where it ends. That seems like the right kind of conversation to still be having at the end of the summer.