SEPTEMBER SIGNALS A CHANGE

By Marshall McClung
Graham Star Correspondent

September marks a noticeable change in our seasons.  Although the days are still warm in the afternoon, the intense heat and high humidity of August are gone.  The first subtle hints of autumn color begin to appear in the leaves of some trees and shrubs such as sumac, sourwood, and dogwood.

Labor Day is generally considered the last holiday of summer as most schools and colleges have resumed classes or soon will.  September is an in between season, not quite still summer, not yet autumn, although the two sometimes seem to overlap.  September by the calendar ends summer and starts autumn with the advent of the Autumnal Equinox on September 22 or 23 depending on which calendar you check.

Changes are noticeable everywhere.  Darkness falls earlier than it did just a few short weeks ago.  The nights and mornings are cooler.  The hot haze of summer is replaced by cooling fog.  The crickets are singing their last songs before cold weather silences them until another summer.  Katydids are now calling during the day time as well as at night.   Old timers considered them prophets of when the first frost would occur, saying that when they first called at night, it was three months until frost, and when they called during the day, frost was six weeks away.

Our lives are considered to have seasons too, with birth and early childhood being our spring, young adulthood as our summer, autumn as our middle age, and winter as our season of old age or “senior” years if you prefer.  Using this assumption, by the time we reach the “autumn” of our years, we too have noticed a lot of changes, most notably the ones you see in the mirror.   We see “frost” in our hair, and realize there is not as much “fire in the furnace” as there used to be.  Most of us realize by this time, that we are not going to accomplish nearly as much in our lives as we thought we would during our “spring” and “summer.”  As our local old timers would put it, “We haven’t amounted to very much.”  This being the case, our “autumn” is our last chance to make the changes and adjustments we deem necessary before the arrival of our “winter” with its physical and sometimes mental limitations sets in.

We can find comfort in the thought that just as in our natural progression of seasons, spring and summer will return again; those of us who believe in a hereafter know that a better time is coming, even during the darkest, bleakest days and long nights of winter.