How strange it is to know that Emily Dickinson felt the same way about September as I do. So specifically the same. It’s the crickets and the crows who kill me this time of year. My little wind-up cricket who lives in the summer-burnished thyme and sage. The fish crows in my neighborhood who gather in the tall trees in the shifting September light talk to each other with their odd insistent voices. Full, nuanced conversations, not just calling back and forth. All the birds are planning something, preparing for the inevitable slow change in season. September is startling sparrows in the bushes, so they rise and surround you with their soft beating wings, more felt than heard. September is pale hawks in the dark green shadows on the hills, singing their keening song. (How strange to think about Emily Dickinson using the word “fun.”)

And, yes, the dissembling breezes, filtering through the warm air, reminding us of the coolness of a September morning that will return in the evening after the heat of the day. The watery cool chill that envelopes a sunny September day. The dissembling warmth, the dissembling light — so clear in the afternoon, so dusky with the earlier and earlier and earlier-every-day sunset. And the scents, the bewilderingly sweet anise of the Septemer clematis that covers our town, clinging to everything like memories.

This was a strange summer for me, and the time passed strangely, too. In long blindingly-hot leaps, in short shuttered steps. I admit that I wished time away — whole weeks while waiting for news, small hours while waiting for the end of a work day. I regret it now with a bruising regret. September’s melting melancholy is full of these regrets: In the old earliest meaning of the word regret — to miss, to mourn the passing. In that sense I regret those hours, all the hours, even the uneventful unremarkable ones. It’s the retrospects that get you in the end. There’s the sear.

But thinking of early September as the end of summer is a human miscalculation of epic proportions. The garden is still teeming, the tomatoes are still ripening, the day is still plump and warm in the middle, the field is still covered in clover, the new-cut grass smells just as sweet, and the darkness doesn’t fall too early yet. We haven’t reached the equinox. It’s foolish to regret summer’s end, when summer is not over yet. That September regret, that feeling of missing something almost before it has happened, maybe it’s there as a reminder not to make the same mistake again. We have some time and I will not wish it away, this time.

What a remarkable issue of Tidings of Magpies we share again this month! Full of such treasures. As ever, I am beyond grateful to everyone who shared their remarkable work and words with us. Please take the time to read, and, as ever, submit, support, subscribe. And have a look at Tidings of Magpies on Instagram.