September is a month of contradiction. It has one foot in summer and another in autumn. Strings of warm days are divided by chilly nights. The boys of summer swing away even as football returns to America’s gridirons. The name itself is deception: “Septem” is Latin for seven, yet it is the ninth month (a misnomer for which the world has Julius Caesar and his Roman calendar reformation to thank).
But for all of the confusion September stirs, there is no better month to be settled here. The weather, the harvest, the early turning of the leaves – September is New Hampshire in its Sunday best.
The beauty is, you don’t have to take our word for it: Just look around, smell the morning air, listen to wind in late afternoon. And at night, the constellations dance for poor and wealthy alike, and the crickets play adagio no matter how much they’re offered for something a little more up tempo. This is an unequal world, for sure, but September belongs to everyone and nobody.
It’s a political month, too (aren’t they all?), a fact we couldn’t ignore if we tried. For many months, New Hampshire voters have been locked in battle over candidates and issues, both small and large. Tactics are sometimes questionable, but this is the good fight: People divided by perception of the world’s problems but unified, with exceptions, in their desire to fix them.
We imagine the personification of September sitting in observance of all of these fights, chin resting on palms and elbows on knees, marveling at the skill of the combatants – that is, considering their blindness. The world they are fighting for is all around them, but they don’t see it: They’re too busy imagining it destroyed or taken away.
September is as great a month as any to fight for beliefs, especially with the state’s primary less than a week away, but it’s an even better month to take stock of – and experience – all that’s worth fighting for.
It’s a list without end.
In Candide, Voltaire famously skewers the idea that “this is the best of all possible worlds.” Suffering is too great and too widespread for optimism, he believed, and perhaps he was right. But if you want to launch an evidence-based challenge to Voltaire’s position, a September day in New Hampshire is a good start.