Beneath Uncle Tim’s bridge, thousands of hermit crabs crawl across the mudflats like herds of miniature wildebeests migrating across a wet savannah. The sluggish, viscous tide begins to flow slowly in, filling up the lower channels, snaking its way beneath the planks and around the algae-covered pilings of the bridge, carrying nutrients into the upper reaches of the marsh.
It is the week after Labor Day and the beginning of Rosh Hashanah. The beaches are still relatively full, as are the streets, and also many of the restaurants. But there is a definite shift, a gearing down, an expected/unexpected quietness on the beaches and a sudden silence at the ponds that is not solely due to the sudden absence of college students and families with school-age children.
I climb the newly-rebuilt steps that lead up to the top of Cannon Hill. From here the day sparkles like wine; the air has that distinctive early-autumn mixture of clarity and warmth, a sense of loss and desire all in the same moment. A large heron takes off from a clump of shoreline grass and billows out across the marsh, and the sunlight is wet on the fallen pine needles lining the paths. I light one of my half-dozen-a-year cigarillos and watch as the white smoke unfurls and wafts upwards toward the blue sky like the shifting shapes of memory.
As long as I can remember, I’ve always felt this time as the beginning of the year. For a long while I thought this was because when I was a child it coincided with the beginning of the school year. No doubt that was part of it, but over the years the association has grown deeper and more complex. I was thirty-four when I first learned that my mother, and therefore myself, was Jewish. For reasons of her own she had never mentioned it. While surprised, and curious, the revelation came too late for it to change my sense of self – my ethnic or religious identity – in any substantial way. But it did lend a new significance to Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. That holiday’s charge to make amends to and ask forgiveness of those we have hurt, so as to begin the year with a clean slate, deepened my childhood sense of the season as one of new beginnings.
But beneath these artificial, human-conceived calendar benchmarks there lies a solid, deepening sense of September as the commencement of the natural year, a sense fed by the season’s various migrations, shifts of light, and, on this narrow glacial peninsula, an almost audible sigh of relief as the land sheds itself of its excess summer baggage and seems actually to rise a bit more out of the sea, as it did eighteen millennia ago when the ice-sheets retreated.
The wonderful writer and bee-keeper Sue Hubble once wrote, “The end of one honey season is the beginning of the next, and autumn is a good time to begin with bees.” Only humans give meaning to nature, and I like to think that any day, if seen aright, can serve as a good time to begin again, but for me at least, this is the season when the world seems most powerfully like a blank page, asking to be written on.
