September Blues

September Song

September is a phantom month, incorporeal--not quite summer and not quite fall--just passing through the way a ghost does. I shiver and feel anxious. Something is there, but I can't say what. It makes me ambivalent about my time, my plans.

I'm uppity, lost. Want to drive around, want to go somewhere, do something--inaugurate my two-hours of freedom with an event of significance--but I'm not inspired by a destination. I'm just waiting. I'd only drive around in circles.

The fall clothes catalogues that arrive in my mail don't help settle me, either. The long cable-knit cardigans and the leather skirts and boots seem absurd, a vicious taunt to those of us watching thermometers that still register solidly in the high eighties. I want the summer to pack up and leave so I can clean the house (and my head), replace the sheets, and get ready for the next guests who come this time with their hats and their coats and their corduroy zip-zip-zip pants.

Even my daughter feels the slow turning and begins to anticipate what isn't here. She finds all the scarves in the closet and talks about snowball fights. Yes, honey, I would love to have a snowball fight with you. But disembowelling the living room pillows for their stuffing is as close to snow as we'll get for awhile. It's fun, but it won't make winter arrive any faster.

So I'm finishing this and returning to my other ghost, my story. That, too, seems to have lost its direction, so I've printed it up and am re-reading it straight through for some clues to its shape. Somehow, I'll get through it, or it will get through to me, and we'll step out together into October.