Tomorrow is September 1.
Which means today is New Year’s Eve.
Not the official one, obviously. Nobody is going to stand outside tonight in twenty-degree weather wearing a stupid hat and counting backward from ten. There probably won’t be champagne. Ryan Seacrest is unlikely to turn up. And if somebody starts singing Auld Lang Syne, the neighbours may call the police.
But August 31 has always felt a little like the end of a year to me. Maybe it’s because, for the first couple of decades of our lives, September really was the beginning of a new year. Summer ended. School started.
There were new teachers, new classrooms, new clothes and new shoes. Brand-new notebooks that hadn’t yet been subjected to four months of abuse. Fresh packages of pens and pencils. Binders that still closed properly. And, most importantly, the possibility that this year would be different.
This year I would stay organized. This year I would do my homework when it was assigned instead of discovering at nine o’clock Sunday night that the project I’d known about for three weeks was due Monday morning. This year I would keep my desk clean. This year I would—
Okay. Some of us were perhaps making promises that our brains had absolutely no intention of keeping. But the feeling was real. September meant starting again.
Then we grew up, stopped going to school, and discovered that apparently nobody was going to hand us a new package of Laurentian pencil crayons every twelve months anymore. Yet somehow the feeling remained. There is something about the end of August that makes me want to take inventory.
Summer is winding down. The days are noticeably shorter. The garden is starting to look less like something I carefully planned and more like vegetation engaged in a hostile takeover. Evenings are getting cooler. And suddenly the year ahead feels different. Which is ridiculous, of course. September 1 is just another square on the calendar. Nothing magical happens at midnight tonight. Tomorrow morning I’ll be exactly the same person I was today.
But humans are storytellers. We like beginnings. We like chapters. We like being able to draw a line under something and say, Okay. That part is finished. What happens next?
Perhaps that’s why September still works on me. January gets all the attention when it comes to fresh starts, but I’ve never entirely trusted January. January arrives after several weeks of eating things we normally have enough sense not to eat, spending money we probably shouldn’t have spent, sleeping at peculiar hours, and trying to remember what day of the week it is.
Then, at midnight on December 31, we’re suddenly expected to become entirely new human beings. Exercise every day! Lose twenty pounds! Write a novel! Learn Spanish! Organize the garage! January is awfully demanding.
September doesn’t seem to expect quite so much. September just nudges you. Summer’s almost over. Whatcha gonna do now?
For me, of course, part of the answer is always write.
There’s something wonderfully bookish about fall. Maybe it’s the cooler weather. Maybe it’s the earlier darkness. Maybe it’s the childhood association with school and libraries and books tucked under your arm. Whatever the reason, fall feels like a season made for stories.
Summer wants you outside. Fall doesn’t mind if you disappear into another world for a few hours. And that works whether you’re the person writing the story or the person reading it. There are still four full months left in the year. That’s actually a remarkable amount of time.
Enough time to write something. Enough time to read something. Enough time to start something you’ve been thinking about all summer. Enough time to finish something you’ve been avoiding since considerably before summer. Enough time to change your mind about something. Enough time to try again.
We tend to think of years as single stories running from January through December, but I’m not sure that’s how life actually works. Maybe a year is more like a novel. There are acts. There are chapters. There are turning points. Sometimes there’s an unexpected plot twist. Sometimes the protagonist wanders around for fifty pages accomplishing absolutely nothing and the author really should have edited that section more aggressively. And every once in a while, you reach a point where something changes. Not dramatically. No fireworks. No countdown. No champagne. You simply turn the page.
So that’s what August 31 feels like to me.
Not the end of summer, exactly. There will still be warm afternoons. The garden isn’t finished yet. Nobody needs to haul out the snow shovel.
God forbid.
It’s simply a page turning.
Tomorrow is September. A new month. A new season waiting just up ahead. A new chapter. And maybe that’s the nice thing about calendars. They keep giving us places to begin again.
Happy New Year.