mid-September

The last two weeks of September are working out to be the loveliest time of year in both of my homes.

Mid-September in Sydney is when spring gloriously arrives. The sky is just a ridiculous shade of crystal blue, the flowers bloom everywhere and scent the warm breeze blowing over the blue ocean on the sunny beaches. They picked September 15 as the first day of the Olympics when they were in Sydney, because of all this and because those two weeks are the weeks it's least likely to rain (I think they still had some rain, but the first week was glorious). And it's Finals season in all the Rugby codes - full of crescendoes of rivalry and conquest, and large tough footy players who are up for retirement from the code weeping like babies because it's their last home match, their last regular season match, their last Finals match, their last match ever.


Late September in Appleton all those trees that you've watched since March and it seemed like the world would never come back to life, the ones that sprang into that emerald green at last and brought hope back to the world, and gradually darkened into a spinach color and grew dusty when the weather grew hot and dry in August, they start to turn, and for some they go yellow and look like trees look in Australia when they're sick or dying, but many of the others burst into these ridiculous bright hues. There's a maple outside of the office at work that is still dark green at the bottom but the top is bright, bright red. A luscious red that's so rich and vivid that you can't even make the leaf shapes out any more, the dazzle of the color blurs them. Driving around town now you come upon whole vistas of trees that look like this - bright yellow, lovely pumpkin orange, and blazing, ridiculous red. It's still warm enough to be out - the natives are wearing t-shirts and shorts still - but soon the air will have that crisp feeling and people will be wearing sweaters and having to walk closer together to keep warm.

So, if I visit one of my homes during the last weeks in September, I will miss the niceness of the other home at the same time of year.