Love List: September

fairy tale magic | trusting the reader | the secret history

September feels to me like a month of two halves.

In the beginning, it’s late summer — bare legs and long skirts and swims in the sea, pockets still full of sea glass and pebbles in the shape of hearts. There’s promise in those long evenings when the dahlias are in bloom. September light sparkles, and the sunsets, like the flowers, are vivid and intense.

Both the year and September turn on the equinox —that brief moment of balance — after which mornings suddenly become hazy and leaves on the trees turn what Ali Smith calls ‘the deep, done green of the beginning of autumn’. I rub a beech leaf between my fingers. It’s thick and brittle, utterly unlike the baby-soft pale green of spring.

I love September as blank page, a time for focus when ideas start gathering and my desk piles high with notebooks and books, some unread and waiting, others with corners turned down and phrases underlined — margins clamouring with pencil exclamations.