September — The World Comes Back to Life

September is not the end of anything. It is the beginning of everything I love.

I have been waiting for this month since approximately the middle of July.

Summer gave us the pool and the tomatoes and the fireflies and long evenings on the porch. I have said my goodbyes to it with a little tenderness. But September is when I come back to myself, when the world cools down just enough and the light shifts just slightly and something inside me lifts. I feel it before the calendar confirms it. The mornings get quieter. The shadows fall at a different angle. The air, even on a still-warm day, carries a different quality. I walk outside with Patches at seven in the morning and something tells me: here it is. The turn has happened.

September is my favorite month. I won’t pretend otherwise. It is the month when everything I love about being home comes back into season at once: the cool mornings and evenings, the excuse to pull out the first throw of the year, the smell of something braised on the stove, the stack of new books by the chair, the afternoon light through the windows that makes even an ordinary room look like a painting. Come in. I’ll put the kettle on.

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What I Am Looking Forward To in September

The first genuinely cool morning. It will come, probably in the second half of the month if we are lucky, maybe not until the very last days. And I will be outside with the dogs when it arrives. There will be a crispness that was not there the day before, a thing you feel in your lungs before you register it with your mind. And there will be a scent on the air from someone like me, someone who loves the chill just as much and has lit the first fire of the year.

The return of soup season. I know that sounds like a small thing. It isn’t. Soup season means the kitchen smells the way a kitchen should smell, homey and warm. A pot of chicken soup on a Tuesday afternoon. A tomato bisque made from the last of the summer tomatoes roasted down to something sweet and concentrated and entirely different from what they were in August. A white bean and kale soup that takes an hour and feeds us for two days. I have been planning these for months and I am ready to make them.

The wardrobe pivot. This, too, sounds like a small thing. It is also not. September is when I open the cedar chest and pull out the first plaid of the season. The first cardigan that feels right rather than aspirational. The lighter cashmere before we get to the real cashmere of October. I don’t shop too much for seasons so much as I rediscover them, and there is something genuinely wonderful about finding a sweater at the back of the shelf and thinking: oh, yes. This one. This is one of my favorites.

Football Sunday. Bill is a passionate fan of several things in this life and football is one of them. I am not, exactly, but I have grown fond of what football season means in our house: the weekend rhythms around it, the game on in the background, the particular kind of Sunday it produces. Siblings over, something good in the slow cooker, the sound of a crowd around the tv. I can work in the other room perfectly happily and feel, through the walls, that the season has arrived.

The circle garden is shutting down. After the summer, September is when it begins its last flowers. The peonies, the coreopsis, the milkweed, the catmint have given everything they had and are done. The things that love the cooling temperatures come forward now: the ornamental grasses, the evergreens. September is not the garden’s most spectacular month. But it is still beautiful.

On The Blog This Month

The Menopause Saga continues. If you have been following along, you know this series is close to my heart and that it is the information I wish someone had handed me years ago. If you are just finding it, start with Is there a Manual and read through in order. Please share it with every woman you know. I mean that.

This month on the blog I am also looking forward to a September Seasonal Table with Cindy and a Sweet Treats for Your Sweet Tooth post with Sheri. Both are September favorites and I am excited about what we are each making.

There will also be fall style content, because I cannot help myself and because you asked. Classic pieces that work for this season of life, what I’m actually wearing and why. Keep an eye out.

And a few midlife posts that have been sitting with me through the summer, thoughts I have been turning over quietly and am now ready to put into words. More on those as they come.

What I Am Wearing This Month

September dressing is one of the great pleasures of the year, even if September in North Carolina requires patience. The calendar says fall but the weather may not agree until the end of the month, or let’s be honest, maybe not until November, and so you dress for the version of the month you want while the actual month catches up.

My September uniform starts with linen still but reaches for deeper colors. Navy. Rust. A dark plaid that is technically still too warm but is going in anyway because it is the first plaid of the year and I am not waiting. Flat ankle boots on the days when the morning is cool enough to justify them, sandals when it is not. A light blazer or a cashmere cardigan that does double duty as a layer and as a signal to the universe that fall has been requested.

Jewelry comes back in September. I put away the lighter summer bracelets and bring back some of my fall favorites. A good tortoiseshell bangle. My mother’s brooch. The little pieces that carry the people I love and miss.

You can find my September picks on ShopMy. Be sure to follow me so that you can see all of my latest finds.

What To Cook This Month

This is the month I fall back in love with the stove.

Classic Chicken and Vegetable Soup. Not a recipe, exactly. A practice. A whole chicken, a few carrots, a few ribs of celery, an onion, a bay leaf, whatever herbs I have on hand, and several hours of low simmering that fills the entire house with the smell of something good. I make it at the beginning of the month every single September. It is a ritual more than a recipe. I eat it for days and it does not get old.

Roasted Tomato and Red Pepper Bisque. The bridge between summer and fall, made from the last good tomatoes of August, roasted slowly with red peppers and garlic until they collapse and caramelize and become something entirely different from what they were on the vine. Blended smooth with a swirl of cream, a good piece of crusty bread alongside. This is the soup Bill loves. I, on the other hand, cannot stand a pepper in any color, so I will be eating the bread.

Apple Crisp. Because September and apples are inseparable and because there is nothing in the world that smells better coming out of the oven. Oats and brown sugar and butter and cinnamon, the sound of it bubbling at the edges. A scoop of vanilla ice cream that you don’t need and add anyway. If you need something easier for a crowd, apple bars are the answer.

September is also when I start thinking about the food gifts I will be making for friends and family: chutneys, ice cream toppings, winter jam. It is never too early.

What To Read This Month

September reading should feel like coming home. I want something substantial, something I can settle into over the long evenings that are finally returning. Something with warmth and the kind of writing that makes you read the same sentence twice, not because you didn’t understand it but because you want to hear it again.

Miss Buncle’s Book by D.E. Stevenson. A quiet, funny novel about a woman in a small English village who, needing a little extra income, decides to write a novel. Convinced she has no imagination, she writes about the only thing she knows: her own village and the people in it. The neighbors are not amused. It was published in 1934 and it is as fresh and charming today as it must have been then. If you loved Miss Read, if you loved the Barsetshire novels, if you have been looking for something that feels like a cup of tea and a fire on a cool evening, this is the one.

A Year in the World: Journeys of a Passionate Traveller by Frances Mayes. Frances Mayes, who most of us know from Under the Tuscan Sun, travels for a full year through countries she loves and countries that surprise her. Spain. Morocco. Scotland. Greece. Portugal. She writes about place the way she writes about food and houses. I read this in September because it makes me think about where I have been and where I still want to go, and because the Scottish chapters make me wish, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, that I were sitting in a cottage on a loch with nothing to do but walk and read and watch the light change over the water.

If you are looking for more recommendations, my full reading life lives in Books Are My Windows to the World and I am always happy to point you toward something specific if you tell me what you love.

A Small Joy

The first morning or evening that calls for a lit candle.

Not because it is dark, exactly, but because the light has changed and the room is better with something warm at the center of it. September always has one of those evenings, usually mid-month, where the afternoon turns cool and blue earlier than expected and you find yourself reaching for a match. The wick catches. The smell of warm wax fills the room. And everything in the house settles around that small light, as if it is getting ready for the long months ahead.

That evening is what I am most looking forward to. Every year.

September does not oversell itself the way May does. It does not exhaust you the way July does. It simply arrives, cooler and quieter than what came before, and it gets on with the business of being beautiful.

For those of you who share my love of this month, welcome home. The kettle is on, the soup pot is out, and the light is already changing.

For those of you who are still loyal to summer, I understand completely.

What is your favorite thing about September? Are you a fall person through and through, or does the turning of the season find you with mixed feelings? Tell me in the comments. 

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“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.” — George Eliot

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