We begin this month under a new moon. A dark oracle, hidden by earth’s shadow, up there amongst the twinkling stars—invisibly slipping east to west across the velvety night sky like a black-robed ninja.
In due time, that now-concealed sphere will reveal itself as the burgeoning Harvest Moon—the storied nightlight of song and verse, though we won’t see much of its romanticized silvery gleam for a couple of weeks.
By astronomical reckoning, September is still mostly summer. Autumn doesn’t take over until after the equinox’s passing on the 22nd.
Yet I sometimes wonder about those appointed stargazers and mathematicians who set our official seasonal boundaries.
Amid their collective pondering over how to divide our seasons, and thence order their placement into our almanacs and calendars, were they too busy peering up at the night sky to pay due attention to the earth they were standing upon? Too bent on quibbling over equinoxes, solstices, and planetary conjunctions to look around?
Too caught up in themselves and their mission to occasionally lower their upturned faces, quell their egos, and look around?
Did they believe they were scheduling the seasons?
September may be mostly summer by the book—but it doesn’t exactly look or feel like July or August, in spite of days featuring similar ambient temperatures.
Paradoxically, neither does September much look or feel like autumn. Especially not if you mentally view that season from a leaf-peeper’s anticipated multicolored leaves perspective.
That’s a later version and a later vision of September. True only in its time.
At this point, we’re recognizably not yet there—though it must also be said we’re clearly beyond the stereotypical days of summer.
Seasonally speaking, September can, indeed, be a confusing conundrum. A betwixt-and-between month that serves as the transitional span when summer becomes autumn.
We’re now at a time and place on our home planet’s circular journey that doesn’t fit the charts. Any attempt to shoehorn September into a prescribed spot is ridiculous, like trying to fit gloves on a duck.
September is a doorway month, a portal between seasons. Neither one nor the other… while at the same time, more uniquely its own than just a mere combination.
Already our daily measure of light has begun to noticeably fail. Dawns creep in reluctantly. Dusk settles early. It’s as if darkness grows ever bolder, increasingly more prone to tarry. Night becomes a stalking beast—a strengthening, hungering creature that slowly devours the ripe lushness of summer’s final days.
The blazing sun has lost its sting. Even the hottest afternoons seem oddly mild.
Moreover, the sense of seasonal transformation is both pervasive and palpable—a faintly humming certainty deep in your core. You know—and can feel!—that nature is on the move. The season is shifting, the landscape is changing.
Yet, in spite of its undercurrents and portents, September is an idyllic month. “With summer’s best of weather, and autumn’s best of cheer,” observed one wise poet.
In the gloaming after sundown, there’s a refreshing coolness. It’s a fine time for a country walk. Fields are burnished with goldenrod. Woodlands carry the scent of maturity—a clean, dusty-ripe smell that always reminds me of an old country store I regularly frequented as a kid.
Blackbirds gather in huge flocks, a whirlwind of restless energy. Sometimes a late-migrating nighthawk wheels overhead, intermittently diving for insects. Crickets and their night-singing kin, still fiddle, though perhaps a tad more stridently, as if aware their time is nearly over.
Mornings are soft and gentle, often filled with mist. Jewels of dew cling to everything—grass blades, weed stems, the rusty strands of an old farm fence.
A silken web strung across a garden gate is exquisitely delicate found art.
The ordinary becomes spectacular—an ephemeral, breathtaking transformation.
For an early hour or two, the land lies in a sacred hush, devoid of breeze, as if the new day’s visibly reemerged world were savoring the moment—listening to the soft notes of whispered birdsong for its cue to begin.
September is aster month. Like stars fetched from the night skies and planted throughout the nearby fields, asters are truly flowers for the times. They come in various shades of blue, purple, and white, the latter of which often sport an unobtrusive pastel wash of violet or pink.
But asters—and all of late-summer’s myriad wildflowers—are just one of September’s many gifts.
There’s that pawpaw patch where you give each loaded tree a shake…then listen in happy apprehension as the big, ripened fruits drop noisily through the leaves.
I love pawpaws. And I take great delight in feeling my collecting bag grow heavier with each shaking session. Of course, there’s that incomparable moment when I pause to break open the biggest, ripest pawpaw I’ve foraged, and taste the first exquisite bite of what is unabashedly my all-time favorite wild treat.
September is a hill-country squirrel hunt. Sitting with your back against the bole of a big red oak, beloved old shotgun cradled across your lap, watching a lavender-orange dawn creep over the ridge as dew droplets patter and you strain to hear that exciting telltale “whoosh” of a treetop gray making its way toward a nearby shagbark.
September is an expanse of prairie bluestem the color of old wine. A redtail hawk wheeling high overhead. And monarch butterflies flitting from flower to flower as they aim toward a distant land they’ve never seen.
More than summer, less than autumn. But a bridge between seasons and a month that could be a season all by itself. That’s what September is all about—carrying us from summer into fall.
Reach Jim McGuire at [email protected].
