Late September mornings shimmer with silver spider webs, slung and spun between branches and fences in the pale amber light. If I walk into the sticky wonders in the darkened pre-dawn hours my words are assuredly less poetic, but I still appreciate the face-first reminder of the season’s edge. These spiders, the orb weavers, spin webs of spectacular symmetry. Each night the female creates a new web to catch and eat her prey, which sometimes includes the male orb weavers. In the coming weeks she will attach an egg sack to a sheltered corner or crumbling leaf where the next generation will weather the frozen, silent winter. She herself will die with the first hard frost, having fulfilled every need and promise and eventuality of her brief life. So passes the cycle of days and seasons and generations.
“Life is always a rich and steady time when you are waiting for something to happen or to hatch.”
― E.B. White, "Charlotte's Web"
September is filled with both/and days; brilliant blossoms and fading leaves, wrenching nostalgia and aching wanderlust, and the subtle, pulsing energy of beginnings and endings. Walking the golden center line of September, it would seem, requires outstretched hands for balance. Paradox and ambiguity settle in the center, as still and sure as the spider herself, even as the rest of my carefully spun web breaks down in the wind. This too is part of some unseen cycle; and September tries to teach me, year after year.
"That old September feeling . . . of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air . . . Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year’s mistakes and failures had been wiped clean by summer."
— Wallace Stegner
This is the shoulder season, the liminal space. There has not yet been any loud proclamation of change, no fiery trees or glistening frost. The long shadow of summer still trails behind us as the wildflowers quietly seed the next generation. The days are airy and ephemeral, the transitions slow and subtle; the solid days of gravity have not yet taken hold. For now, the season is merely the beginning of an ending. Summer has induced a willing stupor, but nothing blooms in every season.
“The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year - the days when summer is changing into autumn - the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change.”
-E.B. White, "Charlotte's Web"
I, too, am part of the mysterious alchemy of September, the changes that unearth and enfold, that bring forth both rootedness and fluidity, that hum with vibrancy and melancholy beneath the surface of a changing body and a shifting landscape. It is a time for reckoning, and much has been left undone. There were other responsibilities, unexpected side roads, a fracturing of attentions. I marvel at the singular focus of the orb weaver and her magnificent web; my own gaze wanders, but I too must begin again each day. September is about building up even as we are letting go – both hands open to accept and release.
