It is early Monday morning on the last day of September. Before 6am, I sit in absolute silence in the reading room and listen to all the things which are empty. The air outside is black and the warm corner light glows over the edge of the coffee mug and the damp hem of the thick plaid blanket. It rained around 4am and in a few days I will need to start searching around for socks and shoes with closed toes. I see myself going through the tedious process of removing all the plants from the porch and trying to find the best place to put them; a location where they receive maximum waning autumn light.

I look out the window and consider my day. I decide that when the cars move on my street, the moon moves with them. The red tail lights flicker and fade away in the rain. The moon is gone. As I drive in along the edge of the golf course, there are mini ponds set in the fields sporting layers of filtered fog stacked up on top of each other. All around the ponds these layers look like tubes riding up to heaven. I know there are trolls and leprechauns in that air and I keep both hands on the wheel in case my car starts to vanish in the thick fog, or in case a deer leaps out at my vehicle from the swamp side of the street.

The trick in our building is to ride the elevator without other people. I drag my bags through the front doors of the school and keep my eyes straight ahead looking at the entrance to the corner where the elevator travels. A group of people climb in and one waves as if to ask me whether or not I want them to hold the doors. I shake my head and I step back in a waiting posture to avoid crowding on with them. I look left at the wall and read a poster which states boldly, “It’s okay to not know what you are doing”. I like that. I approach the elevator and I listen as it moves up to the third floor, the faint ding of the bell sounds, muffled doors slide and I hear a voice and then I hear the box in the wall make the same trip in reverse. The door opens and I enter alone. I ride up three flights passing the 44 steps on my side of the building. The stairs are divided into 4 sections of 11 steps apiece. On the other side of the building in at least one stairwell, there are still 44 steps but they are divided into a set of 16 steps, 6 steps, and two sets of 11 steps. I don’t like this side. The uneven chunks of numbers is irritating.

One of my seven year old fellow travelers stops by my office. He’s on the lam again. We talk. “People are telling me to do things I just don’t want to do”. I ask about his Dad, who is no longer living with the family. He hops up on the window ledge in the hallway and stretches out like he was on a bed. We talk a bit more. I ask him if he wants to walk me to the bathroom. He says “No”. He waits back in my office with my student teacher while I take a jog down the other hall. When I return, one of the vice-principals is in my office talking to the seven year old about football. I hear a reference to snacks. The two of them strike some sort of a deal and they disappear down the hallway together. I close the open window on the ledge where he has been lying. It’s beginning to rain again.

I do not really eavesdrop but I love a good dialogue. People tell you everything in time. Just listen long enough and deeply enough. People will tell you more than you would ever wish to know. I can’t explain it and I don’t often understand it. It just is. They talk and they talk and in the end it sounds just like the quietest whisper of a driven leaf on a grey chalk day.

In the autumn of 1969, I entered kindergarten. Five things were true. I wore my hair in two tightly woven braids with matching ribbons. I carried a beige leather purse over my shoulder on a silver colored chain. I rode bus number 36 and my parents mentioned vaguely that my bus driver was ‘rough’. I was terrified of my teacher. There were 50 children in my class.

There were 50 children in my class. There was one, very thin and stringy strongly built custodian who came into our room dutifully day after day and lifted down 50 cots from the high shelves in the cloak room, set them up and again at the end of the day, picked them all up again and re-stacked them on the same shelves. Both of his ears at the tops folded down and back in the wrong direction as if caught in a press at an earlier time in his life. I watched his ears every day and wondered what had gone wrong.

The room was very large. There was a piano and a huge drab looking rug at the end of the space by the windows where we gathered daily to sing. I do not remember a single song learned on that rug. I came from a musical family so there was already plenty of music pouring into my ears at all times both with accompaniment and acapella so I didn’t care too much about the school musical offerings. I was too busy trying to find my allotted space on a rug with 50 children.

We ate lunch in the room and a hot meal cost 25 cents. A carton of milk cost 2 cents. Ice cream appeared on Wednesdays and cost 10 cents. One of the boys seated next to me at the lunch table blew my white paper napkin off the table onto the floor. I did not like him. One of the boys napping next to me in our sea of blue cots, looked over at me one day and promptly vomited under my cot. From a physics standpoint, it was quite a feat since there could not have been more than one inch between our cots and he missed me, but I was not impressed.

There was a boy who smelled like a barnyard and my parents explained there were a number of children in my class who came from families who worked on the land. I understood it better but I still didn’t like it. There was another boy in my class whose cousin sat at my table. He had a Green Hornet coloring book and would not share the book or the crayons with me but he did share them with his cousin. I understood that it was a good thing for families to stick together but I had never had a cousin who was my age or one who attended my school. For me, cousins were family members who had to live at least two states away.

During naptime, all of us were handed gray, itchy wool army blankets that could have come from the Korean War and perhaps further back. My Dad saw them once and remarked he had used a similar blanket during his military service in World War II. There were a couple of students napping among the ocean of gray wool who were lucky enough to have allergies. They were given beautifully colored purple, white and blue striped cotton blankets and they lorded it over the rest of us. I told my parents I wanted an allergy and they told me I didn’t know what I was talking about.

Out of 50 children, there was one boy who was visited regularly by one of the special education teachers and who eventually disappeared from our ranks having been spirited away to another classroom where there were no more than six students. Those students seemed genuinely happier than the rest of us when our long winding line passed their open door and we all caught a brief peek into another world. There was a whole lot of color happening in that room and the teacher wore open toed sandals and had all her fingernails painted brilliant candy apple red. She wore bright Hawaiian print dresses and a lot of lipstick and her hair was piled high up. After various vague comments about school attire and too much ‘flash’ my parents decided that children who were in special education classes needed a lot of bright colors because it helped stimulate their thinking. It was comfortable having a rationale as to the appropriate use of color in school and on one’s professional person and things settled. There were still 49 students so we hardly missed that one boy.

Kindergarten was sort of a wash and my parents told me later that I could have done without it. I could have told them that. On my report card, my teacher wrote in careful looping handwriting that I acted in a manner which showed that I considered myself to be superior to my classmates. I deny it. The teacher did not like me because I was quiet and that made her suspicious. I was just looking for my space on the drab colored rug with the rest of the herd and was busy wondering where the one boy went who slowly got swept up in the tide leading to the special education room where they all seemed happier.

It is 5:00 o’clock; early beginnings in September. Dawn inches out slowly across the land at the edge of the bending river and the moist soil. These rich fields are filled to bursting with corn and beans and wheat. It has been a long time since I wakened at this hour. This time belongs to the farmer and the road crew and the wind which buffets the heavy equipment, the seed spreader and the faces of those hearty souls who have spent their entire lives breathing in this moment. These are the people who prepare plates thick with home fries, bacon and eggs and hotcakes, waiting to be served up greasy and hot. These are the people who build the land so that others may drive through it.

I cannot eat at this hour. It is enough to be awake and to sip strong coffee grown in the deep green heart of Puerto Rico. I listen to the wind chimes clanging wildly on the porch. The breeze sounds different now. The air blows with its edges all curled up, almost as if it is tucking itself in against the coming frosts. There will be a full moon soon.

Last night, at the stroke of midnight the sky stirred and the old moon sighed and rolled over. It’s a long leaf strewn slope down toward the first frost and the heavy splintered baskets of apples with the metal handles which gouge the flesh on your hands if you don’t carry them well. Then there is the pumpkin harvest and the purple ink black shadows lingering over the road on which I travel as I head into the city. I am awake at this early hour and I am privileged to revel in the early September beauty.

It’s the second week of this new school year. The road opens up before me as the fields merge slowly into traffic and the buildings rise up and the mourning dove sleeps far behind me in the woods I leave behind. For now, the time of reading in fields of gold and lavender are gone. The bend in the road along the edge of the mighty river pulls me away from that endless August breeze, past the greening banks of the Genesee on this September morning.

On the first morning of September, we celebrate with strong coffee, hot bagels with whipped cream cheese and small slices of sticky cinnamon coffee cake, fresh from the bakery up the road. It is grey and overcast with pastry thin layers of fog rising from the road’s edge to the top of the front yard tree’s thick, greening foliage. My husband says, “September is doing exactly what September is supposed to do”. I agree. He is silent for a long time. Then he turns and says to me, “I’m proud of you. You do your job well. You fulfill my life”. This is the only sentiment I need to hear as we enter this new phase I call ‘the tightening of days’.

Others call it the beginning of the new school year. In the halcyon days of summer, all of the days run together, streaming from the lake to the bay and down to the very edge of the large pond behind us. Sunshine cooks the rain, which then heats up and spills out, running off into the tin gutters and onto the plants and then steams up again all over the hiding places in the front yard. In time, we sit out our yearly dry spell declaring we could never live in the south and then someone says out loud what we are all thinking. “What sort of a winter do you think we are going to have this year?” The Farmers’ Almanac is referenced and the amount of fuzz on caterpillars and the number of bees and then we just accept the days as they roll on. It heats up even more and then there comes the pouring rain back off the excess hovering over the lake and we all say that we needed it and aren’t we glad and then I delight in a break from having to water all the plants on the porch which I have been nurturing carefully.

It’s the first of September and I sit next to the open window in the middle of a sunbeam, observing my toes. There is still time to look at painted toes stroking back and forth over the sun warmed rug. The caramel colored carpet is the slightest forerunner of caramel apples, cider, spice. A time comes soon when toes disappear under layers of woolen socks, quickly appearing only for a quick hot soak in the tub, a vigorous towel treatment and then hiding again under the donning of socks, slippers, blankets. Around here, toes hibernate deeply; as deeply as the bear, the field mouse and the unborn fawn.

September the first and now the days no longer blend together. The clock demands more and the fluid ebb and flow of the twenty-four hour cycle stops. The edges of the day are crimped up tightly like an overbaked pie. There are x’s on my calendar and due dates and the week stiffens up into a seven day thing, a living monstrosity, and all of our eyes look to the golden moment which is Friday at two in the afternoon. This is the magic hour for the hard working teachers in our building.

I dreamt badly again last night. He can not understand it. “Why are you having such crazy dreams, girl?” It is what it is and I shrug my shoulders. We teachers dream badly and frantically several weeks before the start of a new year. In my dream, I am informed by an authority figure whose face is jagged, nebulous, undefined, that to be more culturally responsive this year, the daily announcements will be given in an unknown African tribal language. The announcements include the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by our school creed. I perform these announcements every morning at the ungodly hour of seven fifty. I declare that I will participate in no such tomfoolery. Call me culturally unresponsive. I will resign from this job. Then I awaken.

Autumn lies around a very small corner. It is early. I slept with the windows open so at 6:15 I hear the neighbor roll out his garbage bin. The heavy rubber wheels rumble steadily, picking up tiny pieces of stone and tar and the softest discarded grass clippings from yesterday’s mowing. I hear a voice on the street and then silence. I pad downstairs and in a few minutes, I set a mug of steaming coffee on the white ledge of the open living room window. It is chilly and I watch the drift of white, filmy air rolling off the top of the coffee and tumbling back into the room. At 6:30 I hear the faintest tolling of a church bell coming from somewhere through the trees and then a determined bird joining in; clucking in the front yard tree. He sits on a thin branch of this young tree but this is not a tree which produces fruit. I hope that the bird is not expecting anything grand this coming spring. I cling to the waning hours of August. The colder seasons are coming. Already, the sun doesn’t fall as strongly on the wall out front and the leaves of the tree turn slightly upward and curled in the breeze.

What we remember best is what we learned first. I remember riding in the car with my father; no seat belts, open windows, breathing in corn dust from the greening fields. Alone on Route 19, our destination is the old building on Main Street in Fillmore; I still feel the splintered wooden flooring under my bare feet. It is a simpler time. The ancient man managing the store and shuffling behind the counter quietly makes our treats; forever faceless. Dad orders a chocolate coke and I work on a root beer float. He sips carefully, favoring upper gums stitched recently by our town dentist. I wrap my bare legs around the steel stool pole. The store is silent. We are the only customers in there. The building is dying. Even I know this as a four year old because the wood smells so, so old. It splinters my bare feet as we leave the building, the floor cracking and sagging. We ride silently back to Houghton, full of sugar and I hold my right arm out the window, opening my palm against the air, fighting its force and letting my long hair whip wildly. My feet are filthy and I crawl over the hot seat into the back to hide as we come into town. I lie on the floor feeling small pieces of stone and tar grind into my knees. It is a simpler time.