Birthday Month

September has always held a special place in my heart. Why? Duh…it’s my birthday month. Over the years I have reminded everyone around me of my birthday and that I don’t just celebrate it one day out of the year. Maybe a birthday week will satisfy you or even just a day. I like to celebrate it for the entire month.

Until now. I feel like my upcoming birthday has slipped up on me without me even noticing it. Why? Age is the answer. I am getting old and I don’t want to. Maybe it is because there are things I had wished to have before I turned 28 years old or maybe it’s because I still don’t know what I want to do with my life.

Skipping the entire month of September is obviously not an option. So I wanted to remind myself that September is still a great month even though I am not recognizing it as my birthday month anymore. I found this piece my great grandma wrote about autumn. It reminds me I need to look at what is around me and be thankful for what I do have in life. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

One morning I go out to pick goldenrods and wild asters, and suddenly it is September, the air is clean and sweet after the rain and smells of wild grapes and windfall apples and a haze hang over the earth.  I get the urge to go for a walk in the woods.

Days grow shorter and a fire in the fireplace feels good after the sun is down. The birds are flocking together, getting ready for that mysterious schedule they all know so well, September is fog over the river and a heavy dew of mornings and the month of the harvest moon. Farmers are gathering in the harvest and looking forward to the next full moon, the hunters moon, and so is his dog, coon’s will feed in the corn fields close to a river and that my friends, will be the place where the hunter and coon-dog will go. When you walk out into the night you can see the smoke float down from the old chimney, look up into the starry sky and (quote Tabor) “There is no remedy for love but to love.”  The goldenrods are many and beautiful and on a sunny afternoon the goldenrod patches are covered with honey bees, as the clover fields are in June, the wood aster also has nectar so the goldenrod and wild aster furnish nectar for our bees in the fall. To many hunt the bee trees and destroy the bees far to late in the fall to make enough honey to last through the winter. My grandfather kept many hives of bees, and he preferred the late honey for his table, because it was so rich with goldenrod, along our school path in the hills grew many goldenrods and asters, I always think of those days when I see the golden patches, I love the long walks in the woods in autumn, I think of a friend that takes night rides on his horse and see and hear the many night creatures and sounds, been going to try it but never have. When autumn begins to walk around us I begin to take long walks in the hills, my mother taught me that and I have learned to love it, I remember her last autumn walk one cold day, she would stop and look around her and say its hazy today killing time as if she knew it was her last, and she was thinking of other walks we made the ones she didn’t need a sweater scarf and cane, in her young days she moved with the swiftness and grace of a deer, but age does something to us all.