September

September is here! I’ve always loved September.

I even like the name of it, how it rolls off the tongue.

I think I love those first hints of fall even more than fall itself, you know, that breeze that carries a different smell, air that seems a bit drier, and a touch a coolness unexpectedly on a Saturday morning.

I love the pennant races in baseball, and the hoopla surrounding the new football season.

I like the woods in September. There is always so much going on in the world of nature in September as plants and bugs and other creatures start to get ready for the coming winter.

I probably like September more now that I don’t have to “go back to school” as in my early years. That always kind of stunk!

I dig equinoxes, and September has one, the autumnal equinox, when the sun rises true east and sets true west, the first official day of fall.

I like gardens in September, the blooming of the late season flowers, so many plants going to seed, brave butterflies passing through or laying eggs, the beginning of the return to the earth of that season’s growth.

I like the poem “thirty days hath September…”

I like the stubble of fields harvested.

There are some September poems I have collected over the years. Here is the first stanza of Wordsworth’s “September, 1819″:

Departing summer hath assumed
aspect tenderly illumed,
The gentlest look of spring;
That calls from yonder leafy shade
Unfaded, yet prepared to fade,
A timely carolling.

John Updike published a calendar for children, each month with a short poem. Here is the poem for September:

The breezes taste
Of apple peel.
The air is full
Of smells to feel-
Ripe fruit, old footballs,
Burning brush,
New books, erasers,
Chalk, and such.
The bee, his hive,
Well-honeyed hum,
And Mother cuts
Chrysanthemums.
Like plates washed clean
With suds, the days
Are polished with
A morning haze.

We’ve had much trouble of late in September – Katrina and 9/11 come to mind, yet September seems to be a quiet month overall, one that sort of passes with little notice. It is sort of an in between month, tucked between its bigger sisters of August and October.

For Iris Dement, September in its quiet unassuming passing reminds her of the quiet passing of her life:

My life, it don’t count for nothing.
When I look at this world, I feel so small.
My life, it’s only a season:
A passing September that no one will recall.

OK, that’s a bit of a downer.

The change of the season from summer to fall, and from fall to winder, used to make me sad. It doesn’t anymore.

I like September. You won’t need to wake me up when September comes, I’ll be awake already.