September

There is a sweetness to the beginning of September, unlike any other month. An arbitrary newness with the start of the school year providing an opportunity even for those who have long since graduated secondary and post secondary, an excuse to reframe the final months of the year. Most beautiful about September is its ability to experience this still outdoors. While January’s New Years résolutions are performed inside local fitness centres and “dry” January only makes early winter evenings feel more bleak, there is an allure to the fall. Conditions still mild enough that restaurants pull open windows so that the chorus of conversation wafts out onto the sidewalks. Families and couples parade by on bicycles in the evening and the creaking of their spokes and little bells add to the medley of sounds. There is a sense of joy and exhaustion in the little grocery stores in the late afternoon. The lineup at the checkout lends itself to the listening in on conversations of children boasting about their new classrooms and teachers to parents who listen with small grins. Thursday evening and the gas station pumps are accumulating long lines of cars, city slickers who are hoping to take advantage of these final warm days by dodging the city for more illustrious and isolated locations. It is late summer evenings like these when the rest of the city feels the same, lost in some type of haze. The sky mostly dark but the air somehow feeling both light and thick with warmth. People walk by holding hands and looking at nothing in particular and talking about nothing too important. Apartments with books and lamps and soft blankets call us home and it is no longer so unbearable to think of putting on a pair of sweatpants and boiling a kettle.