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.
690 Saint Paul 