September

I always feel a kind of poignant wistfulness, a joy shot through with the sorrow of remembrance, when SEPTEMBER comes around, with its sudden and pleasant sharpness in the air, and the smell of wild grapes or chokecherries or ripening wild apples, and the sad memories of school, mingled with a little bit of good here and there.  It seems that night falls too suddenly, and the baseball season is winding down – and yet in some ways SEPTEMBER is the most beautiful month of all, the month most expressive of the full range of human life, from the soft clear light of early childhood to the twilight of old age.
     It’s called SEPTEMBER because it was the SEVENTH month in the old Roman year, until Julius Caesar reformed the calendar and set January as the first month instead of March. The odd thing is that in many places Christians themselves considered the new year to begin in March, at the feast of the Annunciation (March 25), because on that day, and not at the Nativity nine months l…