The Last of September · Gerald McClaw

Well. Here it is, then. The thirtieth.

Yesterday I wrote about September’s penultimate bow, and how October would be a different sort of month — the month of assumption, I called it, the month that proceeds rather than persuades. I said those things with the comfortable authority of someone who had just enjoyed fifteen degrees and mainly clear skies, and who assumed, in the way that Hobbits assume, that one nice day naturally implies another.

September, it turns out, had other plans for its exit.

Overcast. Not dramatically so — no looming thunderheads, no gothic theatre. Just a low, even blanket of cloud pulled across the sky from edge to edge, the colour of old pewter, the sort of overcast that does not threaten so much as insist. Seven point seven degrees when I opened the round door this morning, and the air had that particular quality — damp, still, close — that tells you the world has been breathing moisture all night and has not yet stopped.

Feels like six point three, which is a number that sends you straight back inside for a coat, and possibly a scarf, and certainly a second cup of tea before you commit to anything outdoors.

I confess I stood in the doorway for longer than was strictly necessary, looking out at the lane and trying to decide how I felt about it. Yesterday’s warmth was so convincing. Fifteen point four degrees and clear skies and broad beans flowering and the compost turning out dark and perfect — it had all the markings of a corner turned, a season settled. And now this. Four point four overnight. Ninety-nine percent humidity, which is not weather so much as being gently submerged. The Shire wrapped in cloud like a parcel that nobody has come to collect.

But here is what I have learned about September, having now lived through all thirty of its days this year: it does not owe you consistency. It is not obligated to end on the same note it was singing yesterday. September is the month of persuasion, I said, and persuasion is not a straight line. It doubles back. It reconsiders. It offers you warmth and then takes it away, not out of cruelty but because it wants you to notice the warmth when it returns. You cannot appreciate arrival without the memory of absence.

So I put on my coat and went out anyway.

The wind was barely there. Four point six kilometres per hour from the southeast — the gentlest breath, the sort of wind that you only notice because the very top leaves of the hedge move slightly while everything else stays still. After Monday’s ten-point-eight from the west-southwest, it felt less like wind and more like the atmosphere shifting in its sleep. Peaceful, in its way. The sort of stillness that makes sounds carry further: I could hear a blackbird three gardens over, and something — a wood pigeon, probably — doing that low, worried cooing that wood pigeons specialise in, as if they have perpetually just remembered something they were supposed to do.

The precipitation was listed at one point two millimetres, and I believe it, because at some point during the morning a fine mist settled over everything without ever properly becoming rain. Not drops. Not even drizzle. More like the air itself had become slightly wet, the way a sponge is wet before you squeeze it. My coat had a sheen on it by the time I came back in, but I could not have told you when it got there. This is September’s last trick: weather so subtle it arrives without announcement and leaves without farewell.

I did not garden today. I say this plainly and without shame, though I acknowledge it is the first time in three days I have made that admission. The ground was damp — not muddy, not unworkable, but damp in the way that tells you the soil would prefer to be left alone, and I have learned to listen to preferences like that. The broad beans are still flowering. They will still be flowering tomorrow. They do not require my supervision.

Instead I stayed in and did what Hobbits do when the weather turns close and grey and the world outside looks like it is thinking about something private: I baked.

Scones, since you are asking. Plain scones, because plain scones are the foundation upon which all other scones are commentary, and because I had butter and flour and buttermilk and nothing more ambitious was called for. The kitchen warmed up nicely. The windows fogged. I stood at the counter with floury hands and thought about how strange it is that the same day can hold both disappointment and contentment — disappointment at the lost warmth, contentment at the warmmed kitchen, the smell of baking, the fog on the glass that means the inside is doing exactly what the inside should do when the outside has turned unhelpful.

The scones came out well. Tall, crumbly, slightly golden. I ate one with butter and blackberry jam while it was still warm enough to melt both, and I did not think about the weather at all, which I suspect was the point.

Sunrise was at six fifty-five — a minute earlier than yesterday, the days still stretching, spring still advancing underneath the cloud cover whether the cloud cover acknowledges it or not. Twelve hours and twenty-five minutes of daylight, though “daylight” is perhaps generous when the light in question is the diffused, directionless grey of full overcast. It was bright enough. You could read by it. You could work by it. But it had no edges, no shadows, no warmth. The light of a day that is present but not performing.

UV index maxed at six, which surprised me, because I would not have guessed it from looking at the sky. The sun was up there somewhere behind the pewter, doing its work, radiating its invisible argument for spring, and the fact that I could not see it did not mean it was not trying. There is a lesson in that, probably, but I am too full of scones to chase it.

Sunset at nineteen twenty. A minute later than yesterday. I did not watch it from the bench — there was nothing to watch, really, just the grey slowly becoming a darker grey, the way a room dims when you turn down a lamp rather than switching it off. No gold, no amber, no unnamed pink. Just the quiet departure of a day that arrived quietly and kept its voice low throughout.

September is over.

I am sitting in the kitchen as I write this, and the last scone is on the plate in front of me, and outside the window the dark has come in properly now and the Shire is settling into its first October night. The month that persuades has handed over to the month that proceeds, and I find I am not sad about it, exactly, but I am — what is the word? — grateful. Grateful in the specific way you are grateful for something that is finished, not because you wanted it to end but because it was complete.

Thirty days. Rain and sun and cloud and warmth and cold and broad beans flowering and compost becoming soil and one unexpectedly warm afternoon that I spent on a bench watching the sky do things I cannot name. Days I counted and days I forgot to count and days that counted themselves. Some of them were beautiful. Some of them were grey. Today was grey, and it was fine, because not every ending needs to be beautiful to be right.

The high reached fifteen point eight, apparently, though I must have missed it — I was inside with the scones, and by the time I went out again in the afternoon it had already begun its retreat. That is September in miniature, I think. The warmth comes, and you do not always catch it, and it goes, and you notice the going more than the coming, and then you stand in your doorway in your coat and think: ah, but it was here. It was here, and I was here, and that is enough.

October begins tomorrow. The garden will be there. The broad beans will be there. The mornings will be lighter and the evenings longer and eventually the overcast will lift and I will stand in the lane without a coat again and think nothing of it.

But tonight is the last night of September, and the kitchen is warm, and there is one scone left, and I intend to eat it slowly.

That will do.