Back in the ageless hills, where cicadas chirp by day and katydids fiddle by night, summer sighs in the trees.
And one yellow leaf comes tumbling to the ground.
Along the edge of the pasture the crimson fronds of sumac shout a prophecy as old as time.
Fox grapes, blue-black and heady, fall from the vine.
Burnished spires of goldenrod stand sentinel in the sun.
Green acorns hang on the oaks, tiny green cones on the hemlocks.
Touch-me-nots, looking for all the world like miniature orange pitchers, troop along the edge of the stream.
And the voice of the stream, so full of laughter a month ago, is only a whisper.
August ebbs away and September comes.
Autumn is at hand and summer is reluctant to leave.
To the hillborn, September is many things.
It is huckleberry pie and “hearts a-bustin’ with love”.
It’s the cidery smell of early apples on the ground and the first tang of woodsmoke curling from a chimney.
It’s amber liquid flowing from cider presses and molasses bubbling in the long pans.
It’s new-run furrows for the seeding of turnips and winter greens.
It’s leather-britches and dried fruit hanging in strings from porch ceilings.
Its kraut in the crock and pickled beans in the jar.
It’s gourds on the vine and a flowering pumpkin vine.
It’s pawpaws and maypops yellowing in the sun and the bronze of hillside grass gone to seed.
It’s pretty-by-nights and scarlet sage, lady fingers and dahlias and cosmos proclaiming their ancient glory.
It’s hound dogs lazing in the shade and chickens scratching in the yard.
It’s whippoorwills singing a requiem to summer.
It’s crows cawing and owls hooting.
It’s groundhogs and bears laying on the fat for hibernation.
It’s the haunting purple of wild aster and Joe Pye weed.
It’s walnuts ripening and squirrels busy among the hickories.
It’s fog over the river valleys at dawn and the creep of early scarlet among the maples in the swamp.
It’s gentle winds whispering of frost to come.
It’s the time of golden sunlight, sifting and quivering through tree and flower and shrub.
It’s fledglings on the wing and half grown rabbits in the garden.
September in the hills is a kiss and a sigh, a poem and a ballad.
It’s a family reunion and a homecoming, a box supper and a cake-walk.
It’s bean stringings and pepper stringings.
It’s beets for pickling and apples for pies.
It’s a time when days grow shorter, nights longer.
It is warm days and cool nights.
It’s corncob jelly and elderberry jam.
It’s thistle heads turning to fat tufts of floss.
It’s gingerbread and apple upside-down cake.
It’s a rick of hickory hearth logs, sun drying for winter use.
It’s a fox barking in the night and a possum up a tree.
It’s laying-by time, canning time, pickling time.
It’s ears of corn hardening on the stalk and sliced apples drying in the sun.
It’s the woods beginning to hang out their battle flags among the maple and poplar and red oak and black oak.
It’s chinquapins ripening in the burr and wild cranberries reddening in the bog.
But most of all, September is a goodbye to summer not yet gone and a look to autumn not yet come.