September

So it's officially September, and I've been holding my breath throughout this cool summer, dreading it coming to an early end.  Ever since I've moved north into Canada, I've been resigned to summer ending earlier than my body thinks is right.  This year it seemed summer barely began, or came only in fits and starts, and I was braced for returning from Pennsic to smell that autumn tang in the air, even though the days would still be warm for another month.  But oddly it hasn't really happened yet.  Instead, it's suddenly gotten warm, although in a milder way then I would have expected from high summer, and things that should have happened a month ago are happening now: lots of mosquitos in the backyard, and plants that were dragging along suddenly blooming beautifully.  Not that our plants suffered at all this year: the rain made them beautiful and low maintenance for me, but they've suddenly burst out.  B & I are beginning a new garden project, something we've wanted to do all summer and had tagged as a "summer project", preparing a new part of the property to be garden next year.  He keeps commenting that it's September, but feels like August.  To me, it feels like what I used to know September as, which is just more of August for at least the first half of the month.  I want to be able to savor the last days of summer, and appreciate the slow approach of autumn.     

All this lamenting the end of summer makes it sound as if I hate autumn, but in fact I love it best of all the seasons.  Part of that is the feeling of change it always brings, though, and there's always an element of both potential and destabilization, an unpredictable wind, that comes with it and makes me lament losing the steady, easy warmth of summer.  Autumn is the best season for my art, too: I feel so creative and filled with energy and visions when that cool, oddly nostalgic smell is in the air, and everything glows with a particularly golden warmth, the feeling of September and early October in Penn's Woods.  I felt that nostalgia even as a kid, when I had nothing to be nostalgic about; it was like you could see another time if you looked out of the corner of your eyes.  My brother feels it, too: we have the same idea of a perfect day, and have had since we were kids.  But the very thing that makes autumn inspiring is also what makes me just a bit nervous, a little like I have to look over my shoulder.  Autumn is when adventures begin.  Some of those are institutionalized: going to school instilled in me a pattern that is hard to break, even though I've been out for years.  I feel a little nervous early in the morning in late September, when I smell apples and almost-frost, like I'm meeting a new teacher.  And of course school schedules were probably linked originally to farming needs, so it's not entirely arbitrary that autumn brings change.  It feels basic and primitive: time to move south.  A wired-in nervousness brought on by a change in humidity.   Two favorite books, _The Hobbit_/_ LOTR_, and also _Wind in the Willows_, capture that feeling of autumn potential.   I'd never even read the latter until I was an adult, but I was really taken with how well it explained the feelings I have each fall.   

So here I am, blogging about how inspired I feel by all this potential in the air... time to get off the laptop and actually *do* something with that creativity:)  I'm not actually migrating south, so perhaps I should find something else useful.  B & R's picture is sitting here, its characters smiling knowingly at me, waiting for me to finish them.  Time to get to it... winter could be here any minute, and I have so much to do.