June is birthday month for the Rattrays, with mine and two of my daughters' flipping the calendar this month, each of us a week apart. My brother, father, and a grandfather's birth dates follow in early July, a grandmother's later in the month. There are a few outliers, of course, but for the most part early summer babies predominate — meaning our parents had gotten busy, as they say, the previous September or so.
I don't know if there is anything to it, though I have a suspicion that the first chill nights of late summer and early fall put people in the mood around here. But on the other hand, August nationally is the most populated birth month, so something else might be in play.
As the story goes, when my mother was pregnant with me in 1962, an offer came to her and my father to take up residence in the Cedar Point Lighthouse, the blocky stone building about a half-mile out along a narrow beach. They declined, thinking after consideration that should something happen to my mother and she needed to reach medical care amid a winter storm, their Jeep might not be able to make it to the mainland. As a child, I was sad that I did not spend my first months in a lighthouse, but have since gotten over it.
Storms figure heavily in my other hypothesis about East End babies. September is the height of hurricane season, and even if a storm does not come ashore on the Island, the electric intensity of their distant passes in the ocean must be felt at some atavistic level. Swells from faraway weather hiss across the ocean in September, crashing on the outer bar and throwing great fans of spray. The world sparkles — if that does not put couples in the mood, what would, right?