I drank too much whisky last night. But I enjoyed every drop. It’s just after 3 in the morning and I don’t know why I am awake. I spent my evening listening to my favorite performances on Youtube, refilling my glass and lurching from Springsteen’s gritty poetry to Guy Clark’s roughneck dry wry wit to Nanci Griffith’s graceful poignancy and finally, late at night, coming to safe harbor in the singular tremulous mountain-purity of Emmylou Harris’s ethereal voice. It’s completely, almost unforgivably, self-indulgent, but I now and again surrender to these late night music jags – giving myself over to familiar geniuses who mix poetry and music, warm the brew with artistry, and extract from it 90-proof distillates that feed hungers that I am practiced at ignoring. At middle age, I find myself wanting something that I had as a young man. It’s genuine and it defies simple categorizations like youth, or missed opportunities, or old flames. It bubbles up late at night when my conscious mind is looking the other way, but Bruce, and Guy, and Nanci, and Emmylou see it clearly and re-fill my glass. I drink it up. Every drop.
All summer, we’ve been sleeping with the windows open to the extent that we can tolerate the heat and humidity – saving the air conditioning for the worst of it. But tonight it finally cooled down. I could feel the cold on my face and for the first time since last spring I pull the quilt up over my shoulders. It’s Labor Day weekend and we are on the cusp of September so I lay here staring out the window into the not-quite-complete darkness listening to the not-quite-compete silence. The trees are silhouetted against the faint glow we get from the city to the south and the light on the watertower diffusing in the summer haze. In an hour or two the birds will start but for now all I hear is a delicate chorus of crickets filtered by distance and darkness and through that, the quiet Doppler whine of tires on a distant highway and then a coyote singing far off. I should be sleeping (dammit!), but I do so love the peacefulness late at night and the sense that I alone am awake and alert and able to appreciate it all.
As a kid, I thought that because there were four seasons, each season should be the same length and this was re-enforced by learning that there are three months associated with each of the four seasons. The reality of living in the Great Lakes region is that there really are only two seasons proper – a long summer and an even longer winter, and their boundaries are brief transitions where things change gloriously and quickly and if one misses the opportunity to appreciate it… well, you will just need to wait until the cycle repeats itself. Spring, of course, is the season of procreation. It starts with longed-for warmth and awakening and reaches a crescendo of throbbing and pulsing life driven by flowering and growing and mating and birthing before settling into a relative stasis of hot sleepy afternoons and buzzing insects. During spring, nature’s longing is single-minded and we humans are not entirely immune when parkas and boots and jeans on the sidewalk give way to sundresses and sandals and shorts.
On the cusp of September it’s different. It’s less obvious and less easy to categorize but longing is there all the same. As I stood in the driveway way this morning, I noticed that one branch in the rowdy young maple that lives in my yard was sporting a brace of leaves that were not quite the honest green that they’ve been all summer. I’ve been watching for this. I’ve been looking at individual leaves at various places and finding ragged edges and yellow spots and a dried and weathered textures signaling that the season’s work of making sugars from sunlight is waning and they are spent. Like the hands of an elderly laborer they are at once shaped by and consumed by the work they’ve done. In a few weeks, the maples will be fiery reds and oranges and the oaks more stately bronze embers. In the swamps, the tamarack will be smoky gold. But for now the corn and soybeans in the farm fields are drying and the annuals in the prairie remnants are turning rank yellows and browns. If you look, you will find prairie plants still flowering but the pointillist cumulative effect of these subtle changes in the vegetation, the barest tentative flickers in the conflagration to come, is that the landscape is taking on a golden glow. Subtle at first but a softer light than that of summer – fitting since autumn often feels like an extended twilight.
I am a cold weather phenotype. On the cusp of September I am ready. With winter on the horizon, I am the bear. I hunker myself down and endure. I feel my metabolism turn towards torpor and I am beginning to think more and more about the crock-pot stews, and blankets on my lap and the under-appreciated luxury of wool socks. Books to be read while the wind howls. Skiing in the extended shadows. Looking for tracks on the river ice. Hot coffee on a Saturday afternoon and when it’s late enough, whisky. Bring it on. But not yet.
September glows and shines and sings. The nexus of cooling nighttimes and golden light and the last flourishes of nature’s bounties is fond farewell to summer’s opulence. I bask in the glow and tell myself that I really am not getting older at the ever-accelerating pace that this feels like. Slowing down is only seasonal. I feel a little put-upon by my late night contemplations, thinking the big thoughts when it’s the little ones that I need to get back to sleep – the self-indulgence of a man whose life has room for it. When I was younger, transitions in life were filled with mystery and in the mystery there was opportunity and the space to dream of fantastic new adventures and of whom I might become. With more than a half-century’s Septembers under my belt, there is very little mystery-space anymore and dreams by necessity are more modest. And I don’t mean that in any maudlin sense, just a clear-eyed knowledge that life becomes worn-in by repetition and constrained by ever more unyielding circumstance. I’ve made choices and by and large, I am happy with those choices although I miss the mystery.
A young friend popped into my office this week to tell me that she and her husband are now expecting their first child. I gave her a hug and then listened as she told me about being excited and fearful and happy all at once. It was a moment of pure joy and I saw it in her face. I remember a bit of that and I am grateful for the moment. My wife asked me to help her in the kitchen tonight and I made a joke that made her laugh – another moment. Our kids are high-schoolers now and more and more have their own lives apart from us. I suppose I am fearful still. But September comes and glows and shines. Every year, right on time. And every year the cooling weather and the scent of drying plants soothes and reminds me of the gift September is. There are fewer birds in my yard now, mainly the stalwarts that persist to visit my feeder during the winter. They will announce the dawn in an hour or two and soon after, my neighborhood will fill with the sounds of my neighbors getting off to work and to school. But if I can remain awake, and if I can keep my attention focused through not-quite-complete silence, perhaps that coyote will sing for me again.