No, you don’t need to check your calendar or the weather. It isn’t December, and it certainly isn’t cold outside. In fact, the weather is perfect to sit on my porch or relax in my hammock. Regardless, from my perspective June evokes a sense of finality. It’s this interesting contradiction of blooming and ending. What I see outside my office window doesn’t necessarily align with events on the calendar.

When you’re a kid, the school year ends in June (at least in New Hampshire). You’ve completed a grade level and now have seemingly endless weeks of summer fun stretching in front of you. Post-college most people move into careers that don’t operate around a school year schedule, but my first career was as a teacher, so I still had a sense of year end in June. After a year of watching my students bloom, it was time to recharge and modify curriculum before the next group began. Leaving education to build PeKu, I had thought the feeling of year end might dissipate, but it really hasn’t.

PeKu is a perpetual publishing machine, which means no more summer break for me or my team. However, there are factors both business and personal, which keep this sensation of year end in June alive. PeKu (or Wasabi Media Group, as it was then called) launched in July 2008. So, for both sentimental and analytical reasons, June does mark the end of the year. Additionally, I’m a mom, so the rhythm of the day changes in June, as the kids go from catching the bus/driving to school early in the morning to rolling out of bed in time to hang out with friends/go to work.

This year, my younger child graduates from high school, giving this June has an even stronger sense of finality. She will head to college at the end of summer, and that will mark the end of school-aged children for me.

As another year of school and PeKu draw to a close, I look outside my office window and see our peonies in full bloom. I am reminded that it has been a good year and another one is about to begin.