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Try To Remember

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Today’s guest post comes from Beth-Ann.

September has always been my favorite month. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe I loved the ninth month because it hosted my birthday, but I think I favored it because I have always loved school.

The day after Labor Day always seemed to be New Year’s Day. A new school year was a new beginning. We didn’t do a lot of shopping when I was growing up, but I clearly remember shopping expeditions for school clothes. There were those crisp new dresses with the itchy crinolines that we begged mom to remove with her vicious seam ripper. Even more emblematic were the new school shoes-always leather and either tied or buckled because loafers were verboten until sixth grade. Of course we wore our new duds even though I grew up far south of here where it was too warm for long sleeves or corduroy.

When we got to school the magic continued. It wasn’t until after we arrived that we learned the names of our teacher and our new classmates. Hope lived eternal for “the nice teacher” and a class without mean boys. We got new books or at least new used books and got to write our names in them.
Frankly I found summer boring and was glad for September and a chance to get back to a building with spelling bees, good grades, and library books. We got our supply lists and got to go buy new notebooks, crayons, and pencil boxes.

I remember September with the sweetness of “The Fantasticks.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYiorhIIsXI&feature=fvsr

My enthusiasm for the golden month with blue skies re-ignited when my son was young. I found the start of school more fun than he did, but he always liked camp more than school.

My heart no longer goes pitter pat as August ends. As much as I love the Fair, I am careful not to go on the Last Day in order to avoid seeing the end of summer and the beginning of September. Even though I have the wistful fondness for the sweet month in Jerry Orbach’s song, I know it is the dread gateway to the nasty, short gray days of a loong Minnesota winter. The cold future dulls even the blue sky and the taste of rich ripe tomatoes.

How do you remember September?

61 thoughts on “Try To Remember”

  1. Morning all… very nice post, Beth-Ann.

    Although I was also a “school-lover”, as an adult, I’m not that fond of September… or rather I guess I don’t give September much due. August is gone and I miss it, but October, which is one of my favorite months, isn’t here yet. Sending the teenager back to school, while not exactly stressful anymore, is a change in the household routine that takes a couple of weeks to really adjust to. And, the non-dress code summer that we had at my office is over now as well (I wore flip flops the ENTIRE summer). But I do like that the nights are cooler now.

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  2. September often makes me think of one year when I was ten. My family was moving, and there was a one-month gap between the sale of the house and the acquisition of the rental duplex. Some friends of my parents ran a YMCA camp south of Hudson and offered to let us stay in one of the cabins there. It was a large one-room cabin with about ten bunk beds. My mother humored me by letting me pick a different bunk bed to sleep in every night. The bathrooms were in a separate building and pretty primitive. There was no TV, but I had a little transistor radio. My sister and I went to school during the daytime, and then came back to the cabin in the evening, so there was a sense of having one foot in summer and one foot in fall.

    My memory of how we spent the time has faded, but I still have a sense of how sharp and chilly the air was in the mornings as October approached.

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    1. Wow. That brings back a really early fall memory from when I was 3. We stayed at “the lake house” while waiting for our “new house” to be ready. I slept in a big bed with a bunch of chairs along the edge to keep me from falling out. (I really don’t think they could have kept me from falling out.) It was too cold to go swimming but I did get to go wading. Mom was so lonely while Dad was at work (nobody else around in the neighboring cabins) that she welcomed a magazine saleswoman in for coffee one day.

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  3. Good morning to all,

    I don’t remember looking forward to the start of school in September. I do remember that I usually started school out on a positive note. It seemed it was always my hope that I would have good classes, good teachers, and interesting school activities. At the start of the school year much that was offered sounded interesting. Latter most of it became boring.

    Currently September is a busy month for me. Usually we take a short vacation in September. Also there is still plenty of gardening to do and out side projects to complete. There is never any end to painting and other house repair projects that need to be completed before cold weather arrives.

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    1. Oh my….the mention of September birthdays jogged my memory. We let your birthday go by without a shout out! Happy five-days-late birthday Jim in CG!

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      5. Thanks for the birthday greetings. I had a meal out at a resturant in the twin cities with my daughters and their families. That plan worked fairly well and it was a good celibration. As some of you know, considering some of the comment about family gathering yesterday, there can be a lot of tension at family get togethers.

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  4. I love September because it straddles summer and fall – the first crisp mornings when the air smells sweet, the hints of trees turning color, a few warm days yet with evenings in the 60s and sometimes 70s still. Loved the first day of school as a kid – new crayons, new lunch box, new StrideRites…and it is my birthday month, too (also two of my cousins and my grandfather) – so it is a time of celebration in my world.

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      2. I think it would be a tough scent to re-create. A true crayon smell is both wax and paper, but slightly musty paper to my nose. A candle does not smell the same. And for me part of the fun is all of the colors along with the smell. The sharp, fresh crayons, the yellow and green box, the slightly oily feel of the wax contrasted with the dry feel of the paper wrapper. I had a tough time not snorting Daughter’s new boxes of crayons before I sent them off to school with her…I do occasionally sneak sniffs of her crayons at home (though crayons all together in a shoe box have an every-so-slightly different smell than a fresh new box of Crayolas…though it is an equally heady scent).

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      3. When the teenager was the child, we had one of those little heaters that made psychedelic crayons. You took all the broken bits of your old crayons and put them in the mold, cranked on the heat and within a few minutes, you had these tie-dye looking crayons. Melted crayons really let loose on the aroma – it was a hoot!

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      1. Following this thread along the path…. at the RenFest on Monday, teenager made a candle which is right next to the Wax Hand booth. Can someone explain why you would want to get a colored wax mold of your hand that you will end up throwing away in a few weeks?

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      2. Those wax hands perplex me, too – I think people are buying the experience of making the hand more than buying the thing to bring home. It is sort of sweet, in a fleeting moment in time sort of way, when young sweethearts make a wax cast holding hands with each other. It’s an of-the-moment purchase from what I can see – the average person doesn’t go out to Ren Fest thinking “gosh, I think I’ll make a wax hand today” (and if the do, I don’t think I want to know).

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  5. No month anywhere is like September on the North Shore. Maybe better, but could not have that character of September on the North Shore. Picnics almost every Sunday for as long as we lived there. Among my two kids’ best memories. My daughter always says that no one had a better childhood than she did, in may ways because of the Shore. My daughter Becca turns 39 on Sunday, and celebrates her 12th anniversary. The background of her birthday pix embody even the smell of September on the NS.
    Her birth was the normal sort of birth. Then five days later My wife and she came come. At 1 a.m. my wife woke up bleeding heavily. I got the next-door neighbor to come over and take care of both children. For the next five nights Becca slept in a dresser drawer over there. When I got my wife to the Two Harbors hospital, the doctor on-call refused to come in because the birth had been in Duluth (because even then my wife had multiple health problems). I am tempted to print the name of that doctor here. HE said “if the birth was there we could take the middle-of-the night problems there too.”
    The nurse, a good friend, gave my wife ergotrate to stop the bleeding, in violation of all rules and laws. I laid her down in the back seat and roared off the Duluth. At 3:45 a.m. I was going down London Road at 60 mph, when a cop car pulled alongside of me, without his siren on. He looked at my face, pointed ahead, and lead me to St, Lukes with his siren on. He helped me get her out of the car and on the gurney. Later I realized I never said a word to him. He just left.
    They decided there that, 1) no doubt it was not as much blood but much of other fluids 2) the ergotrate saved her life, 3) because of the ergotrate they would never really know what had happened. They filed charges against the doctor who would not come in. Nothing resulted of course, except his anger at us fro the next 20 years.
    Here is the odd part: four days later my wife was ready to come home. But I was not allowed into Duluth because of flooding. Flooding in Duluth, mind you. It rained 8 inches in three hours that day and the hill-side streets were torrents for hours. She came home the next day.
    Later this month Becca will donate a kidney for a friend of hers. There’s a complex set of emotions, your 39 year old daughter donating a kidney.

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    2. Yes, God bless that policeman. What a story, Clyde! And then she was (relatively) OK, didn’t have to go back to the hospital again at that time?

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      1. My daughter has always been healthy.
        She had the obvious follow-up surgeries a few months later. But no lingering effects of that. My wife never has been healthy. Then it was linger remnants of rheumatic fever, severe colitis, and diabetes, which she got at the birth of our first child. Now it’s seven major disorders. 80 plus doses of medicine a day. But her attitude has always been positive.

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      2. Confused pronouns there, a la my wife, whose conversation is very hard to follow for confusing pronouns.
        It’s my wife who had the obvious surgeries. Forgot to add that my wife then and now lives entirely on artificial thyroid. For that reason it was assumed she would never get pregnant. Twas a surprise when she did; we were within a few weeks of getting an adopted child.

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    3. That’s some story, Clyde. I can understand your complex emotions about your daughter’s donating a kidney. A generous and courageous thing to do, bless her.

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  6. Thanks for the back to school memories, Beth-Ann! (And the antidote to all the 9/11 hype, which I don’t really need to be reminded about, thank you.) You’ve captured the excitement I felt at the start of the year. Where did you grow up? (if you’ve said, I forget.)

    We moved a lot between my ages of 9 and 14, and almost every year I was beginning life at a new school. So it’s appropriate that next week we’ll move my mom from her Iowa sr. residence to a Robbinsdale sr. residence. Big changes seem to come in September.

    But I love September, there is just something about the quality of the light through the trees against the blue… and the equinox on its way, the shorter days.

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    2. BIR, I was born in Japan and lived in Michigan, NY, North Carolina (K-2), Virginia (3-4), Maryland near DC (4-12), Boston (college), NY (grad school) so I still have a problem answering the where are you from question.

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      1. Good grief, at least a few of my moves were within the same town. If memory serves, Sherrilee also went to a lot of different schools. (?)

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      3. BiR… how to you remember this stuff? Yes, I’m the one who has been to many, many schools due to my parents’ wanderlust. Or rather “we’ve redecorated all these rooms, we need new rooms”lust!

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  7. My hands-down favorite season is autumn, but September in particular? My adoptive mom’s birthday was in September, so that’s a good association. One of the reasons I love September is the change of light: the white glare of summer softening into the gold of autumn. I had prism and stained-glass suncatchers in the southern window of my childhood bedroom, and in September the angle of the sun would have lowered enough to shine through them, so I associate fall rather than spring with rainbows and rich colors. The Renaissance Festival was magical for me when I was a kid, and that was also a September thing. Now I’m learning to can, so I’m becoming personally aware of the harvest, and of course I celebrate the Equinox, the balance point where the year turns inward to winter. Mmm, I feel happy just thinking about scarlet leaves and apples and first frosts! My roommate decorated the apartment with autumn and Halloween stuff yesterday; this summer was so horrible we’re both hoping for a lo-o-o-ng and lovely fall.

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      1. Thanks! I miss my parents’ big chest freezer; I’d love to rampage through the farmers’ markets and stuff that freezer with enough fresh organic produce for the whole winter. I’ve only canned tomatoes so far this year, but Saturday is for pickling. Dilly beans and beets, maybe. I love my canning tutor’s pickled beets!

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  8. Rock Bend note. If anybody wants to exchange cell numbers, my email is shelikins at hotmail.com. I’m going on Saturday. Krista… if you’re reading today, I have your little cooler from Jacque.

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  9. Late August and September are my favorite months out here. The days are warm but not too warm, the humidity is low, the nights are cool, the roses are blooming like crazy, and there are pickles to make and garden veggies to put up. Why am I at work today? I should be at home making salsa and eggplant curry!

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      1. Here’s one of my favorites.
        Baingan Bharta (Eggplant Curry)

        By: Yakuta
        “This is a really easy and tasty Indian dish that is sure to stir up your taste buds. Delicious baingan bharta is ready to eat with pita bread, Indian naan, or rice.
        Prep Time:
        15 Min Cook Time: 45 Min Ready In: 1 Hr

        Original Recipe Yield 4 servings
        Ingredients

        1 large eggplant
        2 tablespoons vegetable oil
        1 teaspoon cumin seeds
        1 medium onion, thinly sliced
        1 tablespoon ginger garlic paste
        1 tablespoon curry powder
        1 tomato, diced
        1/2 cup plain yogurt
        1 fresh jalapeno chile pepper, finely chopped
        1 teaspoon salt
        1/4 bunch cilantro, finely chopped
        Directions

        Preheat oven to 450 degrees F (230 degrees C).
        Place eggplant on a medium baking sheet. Bake 20 to 30 minutes in the preheated oven, until tender. Remove from heat, cool, peel, and chop.
        Heat oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Mix in cumin seeds and onion. Cook and stir until onion is tender.
        Mix ginger garlic paste, curry powder, and tomato into the saucepan, and cook about 1 minute. Stir in yogurt. Mix in eggplant and jalapeno pepper, and season with salt. Cover, and cook 10 minutes over high heat. Remove cover, reduce heat to low, and continue cooking about 5 minutes. Garnish with cilantro to serve.
        Nutritional Information

        Amount Per Serving Calories: 146 | Total Fat: 8g | Cholesterol: 2mg

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      2. That looks wonderful (and familiar; I think I found this or something very like at the co-op once. It was yummy!). I’ll try the recipe before the season ends.

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  11. OT – a couple of really cool things happened with today “the supporting characters in my life”. (But for Anna’s question on her guest blog a couple of weeks ago, I probably wouldn’t think much of it.) In the Trader Joe’s checkout line, the cashier was singing along with a Beatles song, as was I, and she said “Sing with me” and we cranked out the last two stanzas in two-part harmony. You had to be there… 🙂

    And when I was on the phone with Xcel setting up an account for my mom’s new apartment, not only was the woman on the other end of the line courteous and helpful – she was practically euphoric when I told her the circumstances, that my mom was moving up to live near me… “You’re going to be so happy to have her closer to you… Is she glad about it?…” We talked for a while – could have been a bit on GK.

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    2. Yay! I love the mental picture of you singing with the cashier – and how nice to have someone so friendly at Xcel. Glad my post got you thinking. 🙂

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  15. Have a good next several days, Babooners. I will be on spottily at best, but 8 days from now my mother will live in the same town I do for the first time in decades. TTFN…

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