September

"September is the year at the turn, a young mother sending her children off to school and wondering if she can ever catch up with Summer tasks unfinished. It is Autumn at hand and Summer reluctant to leave; it is days loud with cicadas and nights loud with katydids; it is beets for pickling and pears for canning and apples for pies and sauce and cider. It is hot days and cool nights and hurricane and flood and deep hurt and high triumph.

September is both more than a month and less, for it is almost a season in itself. It is flickers in restless flocks, readying for migration; it is goldfinches in thistledown; it is fledglings on the wing, and half-grown rabbits in the garden, and lambs in the feed lot. It is the gleam of goldenrod and the white and lavender and purple of fence row asters, with the bright spangle of bittersweet berries.

September is fog over the river valleys at dawn and the creep of early scarlet among the maples in the swamp. It is sumac in war paint. It is bronze of hillside grass gone to seed. It is walnuts ripening and squirrels busy among the hickories. It is late phlox like a flame in the garden, and zinnias in bold color, and chrysanthemums budding. It is a last gallant flaunt of portulaca and petunias defying time and early frost.

September is the first tang of wood smoke and the smolder of burning leaves. It is bass and perch revitalized in the chilling waters of pond and stream. It is the hunter's dog sniffing the air and quivering to be off to the underbrush. September is time hastening and days shortening, it is the long nights of Autumn closing in with their big stars and glinting moon. September is the wonder and fulfillment and the ever amazing promise of another Autumn." - Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons