September’s Last Memory, by Arianna Schioldager

It is the smell, first and foremost, a nostalgia mixed with mothballs, sweaters removed from cedar chests and leather boots drudged out from the back of hall closets, a smell that wafts into bedrooms quickly, running through house halls like the Mississippi on its meandering course. It is the smell of the changing season, the quick transition from fall to winter, that lets September know its days are numbered.

It is hard sometimes for September to be the month that children dread; backpacks once again filled with cumbersome textbooks, boxed lunches packed and latchkeys hung around necks. Little voices sigh hard when September pokes its neck out from its rabbit hole.

It is hard to follow the summer months, days that drag long, sunsets that never cease. In the summer, hours run lengthy like pulled taffy, or southern drawls in mid-conversation. In the summer, hours drip like molasses, fine and sinewy.

But when the leaves start to drop and the wind chill awakens, heavy feet drag suitcases home from sun-filled vacations, and bemoan the arrival of their foe. Legs lug the memories of summer, hours spent in lakes and backyards, lunching on prolonged picnics, back home, to prepare for fall.

Everything changes in September. The days grow shorter and the dark grows darker.  Everything is slightly more brittle.

It is not so easy, being snuggled in the nooks and crannies, caught in armpit, the bend, of the change of seasons. And yet the month remains a cunning favorite.

“Thank God for September,” says many a parent, ready to return to the regimen of school days.

Photographers unearth their cameras to capture the trees shaking their branches.

Children drop backpacks on doorsteps and bounce into beds of raked leaves.

In this way, September wins our regard with its crisp air and swaths of orange and gold leaves that de-homogenize manicured landscapes, landing across cut grass in haphazard patterns; things fall apart beautifully in September.

And yet it sacrifices eleventh months for one, three hundred and thirty-five days, for thirty.

It hides under our beds, under our porch decks and kitchen sinks, for a mere thirty days.  And then it is over. A flash in the pan. A brief history of time.  And by the time we’ve pulled sweaters from closets, shook out dust and dander from their pockets, October rounds the bend, and September prepares for a long winters nap, knowing that time, like cockroaches, only moves forward.

By the time September goes to sleep, pumpkin patches have already sprung up and around on corners and empty concrete lots.

The last day of the latest September was relatively unremarkable. It celebrated birthdays and births and deaths. It witnessed mild weather. It said a brief goodbye to the world as it stood, knowing full well, that in eleven months time, all might be as different as night and day, as apples and oranges.

Throughout the years, the thirtieth has marked poignant events: the first use of anesthetic ether, the patenting of the stapler, the butchering of Kate Eddowes and Liz Stride by Jack the Riper. Babe Ruth hit his record setting 60^th home run, 22 Nazi leaders were found guilty of war crimes at Nuremberg, and so on.

This year was no fancy day, no cause for alarm or celebration. The ants went marching one by one, and we all moved, slowly along our chosen paths, whistling while we worked or sleepily as we went, and so, September as well, accepted the progression, the transition so old it is forgotten by time.

The last day of this past September passed quietly. It watched the sun sink, one last time, watched memories take shape, conversations over dinner, a small child scream for its mother, a young couple sink beneath their sheets.  Engines were turned off.  Keys were turned clockwise in locks, and as the final minutes and seconds arrived, September soaked in one final long whiff of air, of the smells, of the world, shut its eyes, and said goodbye until next year.

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