Tuesday was, I do declare, the most beautiful day of the year, and not just because it was Tumbleweed Tuesday and I was able to cross Main Street without breaking my stride twice before 9 a.m., nary a car to be seen between the bend around Town Pond to the south and the dip in the highway when it splits at Hook Mill to the north.
I skipped across the road with my dog and again an hour later on my way to work at the church, carrying a tall iced coffee and humming a happy tune. (Actually, humming “Been Caught Stealing” by Jane’s Addiction. The title of the new Austin Butler movie, “Caught Stealing,” has planted that somewhat whiny 1990s hit in my brain, alas.) The air had that very special clarity it gets in September, bang on schedule, with the shadows cast somehow blacker and the sunshine somehow both cooler and more warm and buttery. You know what I mean. Writers on the South Fork should be subject to citizen’s arrest when they drag the topic of the special September light into the conversation, because, boy, what a sentimental cliché. But, you know, it was the best day of the year, weather-wise.
Of course, I am prone to such pronouncements, as has been brought to my attention by various family members more than once over the passing decades. I remember declaring to my mom maybe 20 years ago on a fine May day, “This is the most beautiful day of the year!” And she, rather less of an enthusiast by nature — not to mention, as a member of the 1950s beatnik generation, culturally disinclined to gush over sunshine and puppies — replied, dryly, “Is it?” She glanced out the window (where the boughs were dancing and the blossoms floating in the air like snow), then returned to the editing work on her desk, unimpressed. Another case in point: My children were only perhaps 9 and 11 when they called my attention to the fact that each time we left the house of an evening (come rainstorm, come nor’easter, come crystalline cold snap, come cicadas in chorus) I would pronounce, loudly, “What a beautiful evening!” and direct their attention to the treetops and the scudding clouds.
I can’t help it. It’s always a beautiful evening. The world outside the door seems surprising and, you know, lovely, every time. I’m aware that it is a gift, this capacity to take delight in the physical world without even intentionally doing so. (And I agree with you that being some sort of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm personality, someone who goes around strewing daisies as a matter of evangelical principle, forcing upon others their good cheer, would be annoying indeed. I hope I’m not sounding like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm over here.)
Anyway, it was difficult to be in a bad mood, hard as I tried, with the sense of peace delivered by the slacking of automobile and foot traffic on Labor Day. On Monday, I went to Main Beach for a quick swim, solo, and bobbed in the water like an upright buoy for half an hour at high tide, chest deep just beyond the steep drop-off only a few feet from shore. The beach was quiet, maybe 30 people in all, including lifeguards, at 3 in the afternoon; I was the only person in the water the whole time.
It’s a season for transitions, the month of back to school, new jobs, new argyle socks, new leather boots that squeak, new sweaters, sharpened pencils, empty ledgers, fresh pages in the diary, optimistic doodles in the margins (my initials, your initials, and a heart), coral and burgundy dahlias, and good, firm, tart apples from the apple trees. I’m in the midst of my own transition or transmogrification, against my own will, truth be told. The children have both left the house and I am very much at loose ends trying to discover if this is a season of mourning (poor mama, all alone!) or an open window of liberation through which I must hurl myself.
Projects have been started. If only I clean one shelf per day in the dusty, musty, higgelty-piggelty pantry, I will have a sparkling pantry in 12 days. It will dazzle the eye like the twinkle of a clean kitchen sink in a 1950s TV ad for Comet cleanser. That one thinly veiled fiction book I wrote five or six years ago, still in a cardboard banker’s box under the day bed with the gray and pink geranium slipcover, is to be turned into a memoir of Manhattan in the 1990s. If only I revise one chapter per week, I’ll have a new and surely highly commercial nonfiction book by Halloween. The very sharp, steel, rolling-wheel pizza cutter that I almost never use could work excellently to trim the edges of the grass that is growing over the brick walkway out front of the house that I mentioned last week; if it is dulled and I have to buy a new pizza cutter, so what, right? Que sera sera. It’s a perfect day to take a pizza cutter outside to do some yard work.