ALMANAC
September
By Ashley Walshe
September is the letter you don’t see coming. The one you will memorize. The thorn and the balm for your aching heart.
Dear one, summer writes in florid longhand. This won’t be easy. I love you, and I must go.
Your head spins. You can smell her on the pages, in the air, on your skin — the spicy-sweet amalgam of pepperbush, honeycomb and night-blooming jasmine. You steady yourself and keep reading.
Her tone is as soft as lamb’s ear, gentle as butterfly, warm as field mouse. Still, your heart feels like an orchard floor, each word a plummeting apple. Not just the fruit wears the bruise.
You can never lose me, she writes. Close your eyes and feel me now.
Sunlight caresses your face, chest and shoulders. At once, you’re watching a movie reel of summer, recalling the riot of milkweed, the tangles of wild bramble, the deafening hum of cicadas.
Picnics and hammocks. Daydreams and dragonflies. Puffballs and palmfuls of berries. It’s all right here.
When you open your eyes, you notice a lightness in your chest — a shift.
Yes, a yellow leaf is falling. But, look. Wild muscadine climbs toward the dwindling sun, singing silent vows in golden light.
You can chase me if you wish, she writes, her script now hurried. Or, you can be as fruit on vine: purple yet unbruised, ripe with sweetness and steadfast as the seeds you hold within you.
Bird Candy
If you think our flowering dogwoods put on a show in early spring — striking white (or pink) bracts popping against the still-leafless woods — just wait until month’s end, when its ripe berries bring in waves of avian passersby.
Of course, there are the usual suspects: mockingbirds and jays; woodpeckers and warblers; cardinals, catbirds, thrashers and thrushes. But if you’re lucky, those clusters of brilliant red berries could conjure migratory wonders such as the scarlet tanager, the rose-breasted grosbeak or even a rowdy troupe of cedar waxwings to your own front yard.
According to one online database (wildfoods4wildlife.com), the flowering dogwood berry ranks No. 29 on the “Top 75” list of wildlife-preferred berries and fruits. While blackberries top the list, flowering dogwood ranks above persimmon, plum and black cherry (note: ranks were determined by the number of species that eat said fruit, not by its palatability). If curated by tastiness — or mockingbird — sun-ripened figs would have surely made the cut.
Lucky Charms
On Sept. 19, three days before the Autumnal Equinox, look to the pre-dawn sky to catch a thin crescent moon hovering ever close to brilliant Venus. Although a lunar occultation of the Morning Star will be visible from Alaska and parts of Canada (that’s when the moon passes directly in front of the planet), we’ll witness a conjunction more akin to charms dangling from an invisible chain.