I love you already, September

So, the days are largely writing and cooking and playing tennis. Keeping up with the dishes and laundry. Phone conversations and watching PBS specials about the Kennedys and daydreaming of bed and breakfasts, and wouldn’t you know I saw a hummingbird flitting around a red-flowered “hummingbird bush” in our backyard just yesterday? I love it when plants, people, and objects live up to their names.

September arrived and brought cool air—I have the windows open. Jesse wore jeans. This is the way a month endears itself. And makes me want to buy a scraggly little “decorative” stick-broom that smells like cinnamon, like they used to sell in Publix when the pumpkins came out. There are many days I find myself longing for Publix. I think there’s something about the grocery store you grew up with, and the grocery store you shopped at in college, and the grocery store you shopped at when you were first married. There is something about its bakery, about the way its store-brand items are packaged. There are the subs we used to order—there’s me, coming home from the UCF rec center (a yoga class with Marianne, perhaps?), stopping by Publix to pick up subs. I was getting one for me, plus two more for Jesse and Scott, and there I was in the check-out line, skinny and wearing workout clothes, arms around three foot-long subs. What a sight.

Monday I made Thai food, and the whole house smelled like coconut milk and Thai basil and a little hint of fish sauce. I wanted it to smell like that for days. I never wanted to cook again and cover up that warm and welcoming smell. But, then yesterday I made chocolate chip cookies, and that was a nice substitute smell. It took me forever to find fair-trade chocolate chips, as I recently learned that chocolate and coffee are two crops largely harvested by slave labor. (Imagine. In 2009.) So, I can’t change the world, but I can buy fair-trade coffee and chocolate, and if that means I have fewer cookies because of the cost, well I think that’s fine by me. (The cookies also had organic butter and that unbleached sugar in them, and I thought—is this me now? I kind of liked it. And then I put in Jell-O vanilla pudding and there went that.)

This afternoon was perhaps one of the best of the year. I was tired, as we were up early this morning for dentist appointments, and it’s the beginning of the month, so the deadlines are still weeks away, and I have a library book I’ve been reading for far too long. It’s clogging the pipeline; there are books behind it waiting, including one Sharon lent me, so I really must finish this one. So, I opened the windows in my office and crashed on the futon with the book and just read and read. Oliver was curled at my feet, and Gracie was balled up on my desk chair. And as I read, it was overcast outside and I could hear all the sounds of other people’s lives—there, a car door closing. Someone is leaving to grocery shop. The school bus wheezed to a stop, and kids poured out in the way kids must do when finally free at the end of the school day (is there any feeling so vivid and lovely than the ending of a school day?). Another car door—someone has returned with the groceries. Someone is making dinner, perhaps. Someone is walking the dog. A wind chime is ringing. And then there’s me, sprawled on a futon with a book and a quilt my grandmother made. I fell asleep for a while, and when I woke up I felt I had slept just enough.