September’s Memory
September 2002
“April,”
wrote T.S. Elliot in his poem The
Wasteland is the “cruelest month; breeding lilacs of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”
But in
While
April’s pain is in the promise, the pain of August is found in recollection.
In August
our spring time energies lie spent and mostly unfulfilled. In August the hot
days finally slow us down, while in the dusty heat of afternoon the locusts
sing their annual message of melancholy: “This summer passed us by more swiftly
than last.”
Now comes
September and we Vermonters face the cruelest truth of all.
God is about
to give us a glimpse of heaven. She is about to remind us that there is a possibility
for happiness that (as Robert Frost said “we somehow haven’t to deserve.”) for
in the dying of the great North American hardwoods there comes the planet’s
most glorious moment—an explosion of brilliant reds and golds
set agains the green of fir and pine and canopied by
the sharp blue of the autumn sky.
September is
a prelude to that moment. In September there remains a
residual warmth in the land, soaked up by the sod since early June.
Clear air drifts down from
For as
September fades there we will know again the sadness of perfect job, a land
warm enough to snuggle into, a sky crisp enough to breath—all enwrapped in our
most desperate longing, an instant so pure it will never end.
As August is
melancholy, therefore, September is anticipation. The hot golden afternoons,
the sharp evening shade and the cold wet of dawn foretell days so intensely
beautiful that (as with the purest moments of love) there is little to do with
them but weep.
But all this
will come later. For now what better time to recall together the haunting
lyrics from the play, The Fantastics, as they tell us that deep in December it
will be nice to remember the fires of September that make us mellow.
The dark
days of winter will too soon be upon us. Let us now rejoice in living
September’s memory.