I Love September

I wrote this about three years ago. I think it is one of the better things I have written.

I close the door on the summer with a contented sigh. Gone are the traffic jams, the irritable tourists, the sweltering discomfort. No more waiting an hour for a table at the local restaurant, or taking your life into your own hands getting in your car. I can go shopping at a reasonable hour again and I have my pick of parking spaces. September is here with its cool winds and chilly nights.

            I put the air conditioners away, open all of the windows and feed the birds twice a day as they swarm the feeder on their migrations south. I stand at the kitchen counter wrapped in a light blanket with my cats, watching them cackle and preen. They can have their love affair with the summer. I look forward to the taste of the chilled air, the smell of rotting leaves, the sounds of fall. I drape colorful soft blankets over the furniture and want to roll in the sound of falling leaves. I laugh at the way my cats hunt them through the window. I love raking leaves into a giant pile. I will never grow too old to jump in them.

            Fruit salad and iced coffee switch over to oatmeal and tea. I’ll miss barbeques on the beach and a cold beer after a long hot day. But sitting around the dinner table in the warmth and comfort of my home while the world gets cold and hard outside is a wonderful feeling. I feel like a bear in my cave. I have everything I am going to need for the long relaxing winter.

            School buses are back, giant yellow boxes of squabbling and laughing children. It makes me glad I will never have more than three or four children in any vehicle I will ever drive. I watch the bus stop on my street and drop off smiling children who run to their parents waving colorful school projects proudly. There is something wonderful about that moment when a child comes home that never fades, not even with age. I get the same feeling when I step through my parent’s front door at the age of twenty four.

            In a tourist community like Cape Cod, the fall is a time to celebrate the end of eighty hour work weeks, two or three jobs at a time, cleaning on weekends for extra cash. It is a time to celebrate having our home back, being able to take left turns on the highway again. It is a time to celebrate our small community that depends on three months to support us all year.

The summer was spent outdoors, on vacations, on adventures, and for most locals on Cape Cod, working overtime. The fall pulls us back inside, back into our families. The excuses of being too busy in the summer don’t settle well with the falling leaves. Fall reminds us to slow down. It reminds us to take time to call our friends, to visit our grandparents, our children.

It is a time to celebrate abundance. Halloween, Thanksgiving, and for some people, football season are some of the best times all year. Thanksgiving has been a personal favorite holiday of mine since I was a small child. I grew up in a divorced family, and both of my parents have moved numerous times. Thanksgiving has moved from home to home, town to town, alternating between parents each year. This constant changing has made Thanksgiving my favorite holiday because it taught me a very important lesson. It is not the house you come home to, but the people living in it, and we should never take any of them for granted.

Fall is possibly the most inspiring time of year. Is there anything more beautiful than leaves changing color? It is like having a sunset on every tree. Even on Cape Cod where we mostly have scrub pines, the fall colors are still breathtaking. I could spend all day searching for the most beautiful colored leaf. Trees have always amazed me. A tree survives the long winter, barren, colorless. It celebrates spring with buds and flowers and seeds. The leaves decorate the summer in a rush of green. But it is in the fall, toward the end of their life, that leaves are the most beautiful. I think that is true of people as well.

            The seasons are a mirror of the stages in our lives. Fall is a few months before the harshness of winter where you can still go outside and enjoy the sunshine as long as you bring a sweatshirt. As I said, I believe it is the most beautiful time of year. There is a playfulness to the fall that most people don’t concentrate on. Some people look at leaves changing color and see it as dying. I see it as becoming more beautiful. They have soaked up so much life and they wear it proudly. Some people see them falling to the ground and rotting. I see them dancing on the wind, finally free of the tree that restricted them. They get raked into piles and twine around laughing children who roll in them. We could learn a lot from leaves.

            Some people mourn the summer. I believe it has its place, but on my list of favorite times is not it. The summer becomes too cluttered, to full. The fall is left open with time to just be. So many beautiful things surround us and comfort us as we settle in for the winter. The summer’s warmth is full of energy, but it is not particularly lasting. The warmth that we can build over the fall will keep us warm through the winter. I love September.