The Sweet In-between
What to do with you, September? The weather can’t pick a lane: Sweaters! Flip-flops! Open the windows! Shut the windows and put the damn flannel sheets on! The trees are in perpetual identity crisis. Mostly, green still reigns. But flashes of color appear with licks of yellow around the crown, in lower branches that have given up and turned red making the tree look like it fled the scene of a dye job gone bad. Havoc. Mayhem. A toddler with two different colored socks. It’s a whole thing with her, you know, September.
Stuck between hippy-dippy-love child summer and the full-throated diva of true autumn, September is doing her best. Aren’t we all? And besides, she has big shoes to fill in each direction. Who can blame her for going at it a bit addled, all thumbs. Who’s to judge her for mucking around with paper mache and colored pencils while people smile in that socially polite way you do when you see a child’s scribbled drawing proudly tacked to a refrigerator door. Good effort! Keep doing your math homework!
September can see October out of the corner of her eye. She knows that October is priming her canvas, unpacking her brushes, mixing up the expensive oils, waiting for the go-ahead to turn every wooded stretch of road and rolling field into an immersive masterpiece. That’s the way New England appears each fall. Everywhere you look, anyway you point your compass, a tsunami of scarlets, tangerines, and mustards washes over the landscape. An entire, storied New England life emerges out of this freshly painted scene. Suddenly that beautiful red barn nestled into a hillside resembling a patchwork quilt could be your life. One with a cozy woodstove and fresh baked bread and a gentle cantor through the fields on your horse named Buddy and a partner that leaves you little love notes next to your favorite coffee mug and who never nags or complains or pretends not to hear what you said AGAIN BUT LOUDER AND WITH A TONE. This is the Hallmark romcom movie magical spell cast once October shows up to do her thing.
September doesn’t have a chance.
She’s the wing woman; the bridesmaid, never the bride; the friend “with the great personality.” I feel you. I see you. I have been you.
In graduate school I learned a fancy word for “in-between:” liminal. It essentially means existing in a kind of border state, suspended animation, neither firmly here nor there. It’s the waiting room in an existential dentist’s office, but not even an issue of Highlights Magazine to thumb through. It all seems unnerving, but liminality is the sandbox of possibility. When something is not yet named, not shackled to any one particular identity or thingness, it is pure becoming, complete potential, absolute freedom.
And that seems pretty sweet to me.
Holy WOW... I'm not sure if I'm salivating over the photos or the verbiage! PLEASE submit this to some million dollar contest or something... or somewhere.. more somewheres! As much as I love the way that your voice comes through in this, it's also kind of fun to read that last line in Morgan Freeman's voice:
"liminality is the sandbox of possibility. When something is not yet named, not shackled to any one particular identity or thingness, it is pure becoming, complete potential, absolute freedom."