September Thrills

Helen Hunt Jackson's poem and summer and autumn's best

Nature lushes out in these waning days of summer, while the cold behind the sunshine waits, approaching fast. It’s been a mild month, without the heavy, wet, startling snow mid-month like last year. Instead, warm, bright days and crisp evenings have blended to meander us from one season to the next in an easy, enjoyable stroll.

It’s a period of transition, as we move from vacation to school mode, from shorts to pullovers, from bright bold colors to cozy hues, from a middle-aged year to a definitely aged one. The change to autumn is always bittersweet, because the fade of summer means lively times are past, the fine and fragrant petals dropping, while an astonishing, short-lived glory is on the wind, coming from the wings, on the edge of every leaf, pointing to things promised and as yet unseen.

A friend referenced a poem recently, Helen Hunt Jackson’s “September,” with which I was unfamiliar. It’s worth quoting in full here.

The golden-rod is yellow; The corn is turning brown; The trees in apple orchards With fruit are bending down. The gentian's bluest fringes Are curling in the sun; In dusty pods the milkweed Its hidden silk has spun. The sedges flaunt their harvest, In every meadow nook; And asters by the brook-side Make asters in the brook. From dewy lanes at morning The grapes' sweet odors rise; At noon the roads all flutter With yellow butterflies. By all these lovely tokens September days are here, With summer's best of weather, And autumn's best of cheer. But none of all this beauty Which floods the earth and air Is unto me the secret Which makes September fair. 'Tis a thing which I remember; To name it thrills me yet: One day of one September I never can forget. “To name it thrills me yet”—this is an unspoken memory, a remembrance, and a possible current hope. (That present tense “thrills” portends an ongoing event or a making and remaking in the narrator, doesn’t it?). It's both the past and the present, and further looking forward, that make September special. It’s like the momentary gleam of a lighthouse in a sunset, reflecting the far off, untouchable orb glowing fire, and announcing the steady shore’s unmoving, comforting presence, both at once. A vivid flash, just a glimpse, promising more—a coming anchor, a reunion, a return to home.

We’re not there yet. We’re dusting the cobwebs off of our memory work, relearning our math facts, parsing our Latin declensions, immersing ourselves in history, to move deeper into wisdom. We’re tediously going through drawers and bins to clear out what’s not needed to prepare for the winter, sweeping out the garage and tuning up the snowblower. It is not the seeming effortless turn of the seasons we see in the stores, the sudden eruption of fall foliage in the back aisles of Hobby Lobby in April (or so it seems), evergreens sparkling and begarlanded with twinkling lights popping up in July. Nature is not so calculating or, as it happens, artificial. It waxes and wanes into changes. In September, we shiver in the morning mist and sweat in the afternoon blaze, and that is as it should be. We marvel at the Monarch and see the swallows readying to fly. We prepare, too, and are also patient. October will come soon enough. In the meantime, we try to cherish summer’s best and autumn’s best at the same time.