We got back from the beach in time for the first day of teacher orientation at school and the celebration of the Solemnity of the Assumption. This illustration from Roving Medievalist.

The Assumption has become my favorite Marian feast. I realize that our non-Catholic brethren have a real problem with the Assumption because it isn’t in the Bible. In fact, the evidence for the historicity of the Assumption is pretty scant in the early centuries as well. 
What I love about Pius XII’s statement in Munificentissimus Deus is how he piles up the truths of the incarnation and says how the Assumption was ‘necessary’. For Catholics this evidences the teaching authority of the Church–that she can hear the voice of the faithful for a dogma to be declared and respond positively. Personally, I can scarcely put into words what the feast meant to me this year: there was a palpable sense at the Mass that the Assumption is also a celebration of the fact that through the incarnation, and through the life of Our Lady, there is a new relationship between the spiritual and the physical.
As I celebrated Mass there was a new sense that the whole world is charged with the glory of God, that all things radiated with a new spiritual life, and that Mary’s transformation by God’s grace was at the heart of it all as a foretaste and direction for us all. 
More here from Carl Olson on the lovely feast of the Assumption.