When I Heard the Learn\’d Astronomer

golden dreams were shiny days September 1, 2006

I’m sitting on the cusp of September — since it’s only been here for 48 minutes — and enjoying the view. This is, by far, my favorite month of the year: school’s getting ready to start, the leaves are getting ready to turn; everything has so much promise. I haven’t penned a paper yet for the upcoming year, but I’ve pored over my schedule enough to envision masterful theses that may or may not ever arrive. Though the term “back-to-school” has applied to anything purchased after July 8th, the items I’ve acquired from all those shopping excursions are now getting packed away, ready to be worn and used in all sorts of situations to come. Everything’s in preparation, reveling in its lingering smell of newness and potential.

It’s interesting to note that I don’t get this idealistic at the beginning of a new calendar year. I think my mind is just so academically-oriented from years of being raised as an educator’s daughter that I’ll be forever fixated on the rotation of the Minnesotan public school. Life begins in September to the scholar, though the poet’s just beginning to mourn the dying leaves and dropping temperatures. It’s the season of crisp, well-intended sheets of loose-leaf, on which I’ll have perfect handwriting for at least a week. I’ll promise myself only to write in black ink in my Franklin Covey, to go to sleep at midnight in order to maximize my fresh, bright-eyed gaze from the front row. I’ll write silly, idealistic paragraphs about how alive I’ll feel when the first orange tokens of the Yard give a satisfying crunch beneath my feet. That way, when the numb doldrums of winter set in, I’ll find some encouragement in knowing that, at one point, I still had enough quixotic vocabulary pulsing through me to write something like this and call it postworthy.

‘Night, all.