Poets are busy in September; so are hurricanes

(To herald a new month, here is an old column from exactly a decade ago, September 1st, 2013)

Groucho Marx, the comedian from an earlier era with the dry wit, thick black mustache, and constantly flicking cigar, was apparently no great lover of poetry.  He once said that the only poem he liked started with “Thirty days hath September…” because it actually tells you something.

            But plenty of other folks have sensed truth and beauty in other verses about September, the month of transition in which we now suddenly find ourselves.  Helen Hunt Jackson began her much anthologized poem titled simply “September” with descriptions of yellow golden rod, ripening corn, branches of apple trees bending low with heavy fruit, dewy morning lanes, and other signs of one season sliding into another.  “By all these lovely tokens,” she says, “September days are here, with summer’s best of weather and autumn’s best of cheer.”

            That line doesn’t usually hold true down here in the land of mosquitoes, soaring humidity and tropical tempests, but sometimes Mother Nature provides a local smidgen even this early of the old ‘last of the summer wine – first chilled breath of fall’ mystique that is much more pronounced in points north. Up there, summer gives way to autumn in September in actuality and not just on the calendar, Labor Day being the unofficial transfer point.  That’s when “The Season” has always come to a close, when beach houses and summer homes get shuttered and locked up and barbeque pits get scrubbed down and given a long rest until the next Memorial Day, when summer parties will again fill up social calendars and people governed by society’s rules can wear white again after the browns and heavy tweeds of winter.

            On the gulf coast we have to wait a bit longer for what fall weather we get, early September being usually one of our hottest stretches.  Not to mention the most historically fertile time for the meanest hurricanes.  Like Ike in 2008, Carla in 1961, and the granddaddy of them all, the Galveston storm of 1900. 

            But even being so far removed from the seasonal rituals of other places, September has always meant certain things for me. 

When I was a kid school always started in September, after Labor Day, and never in August like it does now.   Sometimes up in Oakwood the autumn leaves would already be floating down when the school buses started making their runs, and ribbons of smoke would wander through town as people burned leaves in their yards. Miss Francis, my first grade teacher, told us that September was the first of the “burrs” – September, October, November, December; get it? – and she shivered a little to show us that cold weather was on the way. Up on Miss Mae’s hill beside our house pear trees would lean down with juicy, brown fruit, and my mother would put up fig preserves from our own tree and make dewberry cobblers with crisp, sugary crusts.  

A sweet nostalgia always found its way into the ninth month for me.  Until it was tempered with the events of September the eleventh, 2001. 

The poet Amy Lowell went through the same alteration almost a century ago.  In “September, 1918” she paints the picture of a perfect day, an afternoon “the color of water falling through sunlight; the trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves.”  But the news of the world war raging overseas caused her to put such pleasant images away for the present.  “Someday,” she wrote, “there shall be no war. And I shall take out this afternoon and turn it in my fingers”.  But for the time being she only had time to try to “balance myself upon a broken world.”

Sadly, Miss Lowell didn’t live long enough to see a world with no war.  Neither, I suspect, will you or I.

Still, the glory of September remains. The American writer Alexander Theroux captured a little of it in this line from one of his books: “September.  It is the most beautiful of words … evoking orange flowers, swallows, and regret.”

Maybe that mixture of beauty and regret is the key to what makes this particular month so special.  It encompasses the changing of seasons, the reordering of our lives after summertime, and – because of the heartbreak and anger of one September day not long ago – the cruel wind of a much-changed world.

You have yourself a fine September.