Virgina Woolfe says,  “All the months are crude experiments out of which the perfect September is made.”  Everything feels new and fresh.  School is about to start! There’s a shift of air and colors on the edge of change.

September doesn’t begin until we make it past Labor Day. But as August ends, it becomes cool. Suddenly it is: school clothes, new shoes, new paper supplies, pencils, and books. I remember the scent of them all. And the remembered feeling of cool.

We feel the change in light, as our days begin with dawn and impossibly hold on with what seem long luxurious sunsets while yet daylight saving’s time….winds down . Everything seems more urgent though, as the amount of sunlight is shrinking.

What is it about days of change?  I remember one day as if it were yesterday when I saw Timmy very early one warm morning.  It was to me a “normal Sunday.”  I saw Tim stopped at a street corner, and called out: “How’s it going?  What’s up?”  He pulled over. His answer was based in something I’d totally forgotten: “The Pack.” “I always get excited on the First Day!” 

Oh, Right.  How could I have forgotten? It was football season again!   (The home town favorites, the GreenBay Packers were about to take the field for the first game at Lambeau.) 

I’d get equally excited about the first day back to school. What I thought important weren’t classes, but the friends I hadn’t seen for the whole long summer.

New underwear didn’t count, but a new pair of shoes or shirt or sweaters did.  And it would be in a color or stripe that was the “hot thing” of each particular year.  Looking back at the vaunted decade of the 60’s, we all now laugh at bell bottoms and what was thought”cool” back “in the day.”   My laughter is guarded because I think of these clothes over the scent of buckets of blueberries. Blueberries, picked over the dusty sweltering summer to pay for those “nifty” school clothes. I certainly wouldn’t have worn them if I didn’t think of them as”way cool.” School clothes were spiffy, and It was demanded that I change out of them soon as I got home.

My mood on opening day really was triggered by the temp., seems to me, and the feeling of being “flushed/overheated by noon. Why did I wear that sweater anyway?  Where I now live in Maine, the day is likely to have evening temps which dip down to the  50’s.  Now I get to wear long  pants and long sleeved-shirts at night which feel new again in the fall. It is crisp early, but with the sunshine I’ll lose the long sleeves. Tie a sweater over my shoulders. Certainly by mid-morning the warm sun brings back a temperature more like full hot summer’s return. This is the shift which we called, “the lake turning over.”  Growing up on Lake Michigan shores, the temperature of the “big lake” would shift with the fall winds.  Surface water would get blown away and the deeper, cooler stuff, would now be on top.  Nobody would swim for the rest of the year.  As here in Maine, the feeling that days sparkle but they inevitably give way as the cool air nipps at the heels of the warm.

I’ve been skating around this idea that “First Days” give us air that signal days in which everything doesn’t happen according to plan.  Everything, even the air seems new, but it is filled with change. It both surprises us and and then reminds us. The cool is a welcome surprise, and the warm a lingering taunt of summer slipping away.

Oh, there are other firsts:  opening of hunting season, kisses, falling in new love, running onto a night time field under lights, and of course Tim’s Green Bay Packers. Why even my high school’s band’s hats had tassels changed for electrified lights for snake-like “formations” etched into the dark green turf. Exciting stuff!

It seems inevitable to me that we together recreate these feelings by holding the sights, smells, events, changes, and expectations of all of our first days.  Subconsciously we realize that each day can be made new if we give it a chance. If we look ”sharp” as the saying goes. We suddenly notice we’re sharing a day like this with everyone in the whole town.  The whole town shares our mood as the lake turns over, the temperature shifts. It is my guess that it seduces us all and keeps us all from being able to be “too cool for school.”