My Forever Love of September
I have always loved September. Not casually, in the way one might enjoy May or feel grateful for a sunny afternoon in February. I love September with the loyalty generally reserved for old friends, excellent hotels and that one pair of jeans.
January has never been my new year. January is an administrative correction. It arrives in the dark, immediately after we have spent too much money, eaten too much cheese and lost track of what day it is. Then, at the precise moment when the body would prefer to lie quietly under a blanket, January appears with a clipboard and asks about our goals.
September is different. September is full of possibility.
The air changes first. There is a coolness in the morning that was not there the week before. The light becomes sharper. The evenings begin to pull in at the edges, although we are not yet required to discuss how early it gets dark.
In Vancouver, September often gives us the weather we spent all summer waiting for: warm afternoons, blue skies and none of July’s exhausting pressure to be enjoying ourselves properly.
August sunshine feels like an obligation. September sunshine feels like a gift. You can sit outside without wondering whether you should be at the beach, on a boat or having the sort of summer that will look good in a collection of nine photographs.
September asks much less of us. Put on a sweater. Buy some apples. Consider soup.
I love that.
My attachment to September is probably occupational. I have spent most of my life organized around an academic calendar. First as a student, then as a parent, then as a teacher. For me, the year has always begun in September.
It begins with timetables and class lists. New students arrive carrying laptops, water bottles and the touching belief that this will be the semester in which they remain completely current with the readings. Instructors arrive with revised syllabi and similar beliefs.
Everyone is briefly at their best. The students will start assignments early. The instructors will return grading promptly. No one will miss a deadline or send an email beginning, “I know this is last minute.”
There are no late assignments in September. There are only plans.
September is the month before reality has had a chance to make revisions.
As a child, I loved going back to school. This was not a popular position, and I learned to express it carefully around other children. I liked summer. I appreciated swimming, staying up late and being temporarily released from the requirement to know where my indoor shoes were. But by late August, summer began to feel structurally unsound. The days had become vague. The bathing suits were tired. Even the popsicles seemed to have lost their sense of purpose.
Then came the school supplies.
Few experiences have ever matched the clean optimism of a new package of lined paper. There were sharpened pencils, unsullied erasers and notebooks containing no evidence of previous confusion. A fresh binder suggested that this year, unlike all earlier years, every piece of paper would be placed behind the correct divider.
I did not merely purchase school supplies. I purchased a theory of myself.
This self had excellent penmanship. She never lost permission forms. She understood physics immediately and did not begin large projects the night before they were due. She owned a ruler with no teeth marks.
I still become emotionally vulnerable in the stationery aisle at the end of August. Apparently, some part of me remains convinced that the right notebook will bring order to my life. I have purchased enough notebooks to test this theory thoroughly, and yet I do not consider the findings conclusive. The perfect notebook may still be out there.
September invites this kind of optimism. It offers the pleasures of a new beginning without the humiliation of calling it a resolution. You do not need to become an entirely different person. You might simply get back to things.
Back to work. Back to routines.
Summer is lovely, but it is not especially good at containing a life. Meals happen at strange times. People disappear. Emails receive automatic replies explaining that everyone except you is at a cottage.
By September, the world resumes its shape. The calendar fills. The cafés fill. The yoga studio fills with people who have apparently spent August somewhere they could maintain a tan. There is energy again.
I understand that routine is not universally beloved. We are supposed to dream of escaping schedules, obligations and the alarm clock. I enjoy escaping them too. But I also like returning. There is comfort in knowing what happens on Tuesday.
At midlife, I am less interested in unlimited possibility than I once was. Unlimited possibility requires a great many decisions. A routine narrows the field. Coffee at this time. Work at that time. Pilates on Tuesday. Groceries before the refrigerator contains only condiments and one sad lemon.
Structure is not the enemy of freedom. Sometimes it is the thing that allows the rest of a life to happen.
September has structure, but it also has romance. This is an important combination. It has books and sweaters and the first faint consideration of boots. It has late-afternoon light falling across a desk. It has the return of serious cooking after months of dinners assembled from tomatoes, cheese and the general understanding that it is too hot to turn on the oven.
September is when ambition becomes attractive again. Not the loud ambition of January, with its declarations, metrics and newly crowded gyms. September ambition is quieter. You clear the desk. You open the document. You return to the idea you put aside in June because summer was coming and surely summer would provide both time and clarity.
It did not. Summer provided patio reservations. But the idea is still there.
This is another reason I have always loved September: it forgives August. Whatever you did not accomplish over the summer can be reconsidered in September. The books you did not read. The garden you did not transform. The project that remained a project despite being placed on a very attractive summer schedule.
September does not ask for an accounting. It hands you a new page.
There have been Septembers that brought significant changes. This is the first September since 2021 that I am not flying across the country to set a child up in a new temporary home.
Perhaps that is why September feels more poignant now. When I was younger, it seemed to offer an endless supply of fresh starts. If this year did not go as planned, there would always be another binder, another classroom, another September.
I still believe in fresh starts. I am simply more aware that they are not unlimited.
This does not make me love September less. It makes me pay attention. I notice the first cool morning. I notice the students walking toward campus. I notice the particular blue of the sky and the return of coats carried over arms because it was colder when everyone left the house.
I buy the notebook.
Of course I buy the notebook.
~ Danielle