Member-only story
September This Year Is Making Me Sad
But that’s ok.
September.
It is such a beautiful month, isn’t it? It used to be my absolute favorite. I love so many things about it. I love the way the light begins to soften at the edges, becoming ever gentler at each end of the day, abandoning the throbbing white glare of July and August for a new, yolkier haze. The way the leaves on all the trees and bushes turn vibrant and defiant in their imminent death throes, their throaty green giving way to crimson and amber and gold.
I love the sense of anticipation, crisp blank pages, new pencils with their dark sharp tips and clean white erasers on the ends. New shoes, smelling throatily of fresh leather. Posters appearing for evening classes and supper clubs and part-time college courses, on lamp-posts and laptop screens and mailshots. Beginnings, everywhere, even as outside the window the year announces its chilly and inexorable ending.
When my children were small, September is when I would line them up in their starchy new school uniforms and take photos of them, standing straight and shy against our scuffed green front door, dwarfed by brand-new rucksacks bigger than themselves. “Back to school!” I’d announce under the images on Facebook, and as I uploaded each year’s photo the previous year’s version would inevitably float onto my screen from the “Memories” algorithm deep in the app’s innards, biting me with brief nips of nostalgia.
I don’t have small children anymore. This year, I took a single obligatory shot of my lanky, embarrassed youngest daughter, standing self-conscious and alone on the doorstep before she ambled off into her final year of compulsory education. She’s happy, though. She’s so excited. She’s got the future in her sights and only nine more months of having to wear a school uniform.
My son, too, is happy and excited about starting university next week, packing boxes full of sheets and saucepans and books of cheap recipes. He’s got a student railcard and a discounted bus pass and a huge, secondhand wool coat he’s deemed “cool”. We’ll drop him at halls tomorrow and he won’t look back and, of course, I’m so happy for him. I’m happy for all of them. I really am. But at the same time, I’m still so very sad.
