Personalities

Oh, September. In many ways, it’s a lovely month. Kids are back in school, so parents are freed from the stress of trying to put together a piecemeal schedule of relatives, babysitters, and camps with odd and inconvenient hours to try to manage childcare – and yet things are still new enough that we aren’t too frazzled with homework and tests and afternoon sports practices The weather is still uncomfortably hot, but it is no longer unbearably hot. We’re not lucky enough to get actual autumn, but we might be able to actually go outside before 8 p.m. without getting heatstroke. Football is back, but it’s early enough in the season that we can still believe the Saints might win the Super Bowl, and low-stakes enough that we can watch a game while chatting with friends and drinking a beer and not hyperventilating over whether some stupid penalty will keep us out of the playoffs for another year. It’s a brief moment to catch your breath before the holiday craziness begins, followed by the Carnival craziness, followed by the festival craziness. But it’s also not the easiest month, certainly not for me personally. My mother’s birthday was Sept. 3, and mine is Sept. 16, and we always sort of marked them jointly, turning the whole damn month into a glorious celebration of us (and an excuse to eat frequent cake). It’s not even close to the same without her. Of course her birthday is now a bittersweet occasion – I expected that – but I don’t think I fully understood how pale one’s own birthday can feel when the actual person who did the birthing on said day is no longer there. I still have a nice time with my own kids and my husband and my friends, but there is something sacred about your own mother wishing you happy birthday, and the day now feels empty in a way that is hard to define. And then there is hurricane season, still looming, still making me anxious. I always allow myself a teeny tiny sigh of relief when August ends, not because I think we are out of the woods but because at least we are slightly closer to being out of the woods, but I, like most of us, never truly calm down until after Thanksgiving. I have spent more than one birthday evacuated, and I’m not eager to do it again. September is a constant month of breath-holding, watching the news, keeping your gas tank full and your freezer empty, and knowing that those weekend plans you’re making could be drastically canceled at a moment’s notice. On balance, though, I guess it’s a good time to do what New Orleanians do best (even if I personally am not the best at it) and live in the moment. Cheer your loudest at that Saints game. Eat that extra piece of birthday cake. Enjoy the very barest, quietest whisper of autumn on the breeze. Take a moment to be grateful for what you have even while being wistful for what you maybe don’t have anymore. And always, always keep sending all of your energy toward the Gulf, willing the hurricanes to pass us by.