The second day of school we were sent home with slips of paper announcing that for the first time ever students would be allowed to wear shorts to school. Until the weather cooled off. And only if the shorts reached all the way to the knees.
So come, September. Hold us in suspension. The glow of the summer becoming the gold of fall. The equinox. The equal nights. The harvest moon. The nests are abandoned. There is one nest lined with orange hairs from the horses’ tails. Come, September. Suggest winter, but keep it at bay.
It was an evening to wish for, this first day of September, and after dinner Grandma and Grandpa went for a walk. The day’s breeze was gone, and that along with the mild temperature accounted for the way they felt the air only while moving through it. It was refreshing. August was yesterday.
They walked south down the gravel road. The gravel on the road was white, with two smooth wheel tracks. There was corn to the left—taller than Grandpa—and pasture to the right. The sky was stretched wide and cloudless. There were crickets in the ditches.
Their footsteps made sounds on the crushed limestone road. They talked of moving the cattle to the southwest twenty. Of the likely shortage of forage this fall. They talked of how the choir would be visiting another church on Sunday.
They walked, talked, under the bluest of skies, past several blackbirds sitting on the power line.
Then, up ahead in the road, walking toward them, Grandma and Grandpa saw the Smiths, their neighbors. It was the kind of evening that drew couples out of their houses. The Jacksons and the Smiths waved to each other. And as Grandma raised her arm over her head, she felt—and remembered—two things at once: first, the hungry kind of hollowness in her stomach despite having just eaten, which had been pestering her recently, and which seemed related to the indigestion she’d been having for weeks; and second, the twinge of pain in her shoulder and neck—like arthritis, but sharper, denser.
The sun was down, but the light was holding.
So stay, September. Dwell. Stands of goldenrod listing in the sunlight. Sumac tinged with rust. The kingdom of apples. The realm of marigolds. Potatoes in the ground. Racks of onions drying on the front lawn. Walnuts fallen in the gravel road. A snakeskin, one piece, at the base of the rock wall. The way you can ride your bike to the top of the driveway—flanked by old cedars—then coast all the way down to the house, but never getting up much speed, never going fast at all, but coasting, comfortably, agreeably. Just coasting.
A Good Party
Mom stood near the top of the stairs—just her torso and head visible to me—and judged my room not yet acceptably clean.
“But I put everything away,” I protested.
“You pushed your toys into a pile. You haven’t made the bed.”
It was Labor Day and we were off from school.
“Why do I even have to clean my room?” I asked. “I didn’t invite Grandma here.”
“Think about how many times Grandma has had your birthday at her house,” Mom said calmly. “Think about how many cakes she has made you, even when it wasn’t your birthday.”
“I didn’t keep count!”
Then Mom calmly appealed to my sense of responsibility and asked for my cooperation to make this a good day for Grandma. She didn’t threaten punishment or raise her voice or anything. It was one of her most potent ploys. I had no weapon against it. She just asked for my help in this very adult way and then walked back down the stairs. I wasn’t even sure why I was so mad. Perhaps because I saw no prospect of fun in the entire day.
Elizabeth was coming up the stairs.
“I’ll help you, Jeremy,” she said.
I was kneeling by the window, looking out. Elizabeth started making the bed. “Grab the other side,” she said.
I got up and helped.
“It’s a big birthday for Grandma,” Elizabeth said. “She’s seventy.”
“I know,” I said.
“When I turn seventy, will you throw me a birthday party?”
I laughed at such a ludicrous prospect. “Okay.”
“I want lots of balloons and a lemon cake with a sugar glaze. Can you remember that?”
“By the time you are seventy,” I said, “I will be too old to remember anything, so I will probably get you a chocolate cake instead. Or angel food, since that’s what old people like.”
We plopped down my pillows. We were done making the bed.
“Well, I’ll be too old to remember what I asked for,” Elizabeth said, “so I will eat whatever cake you put in front of me. Anyway, thanks for throwing me my seventieth birthday party.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“But for now, it’s Grandma’s day.”
When the first car arrived—earlier than expected—I was the greeting committee. The car brought Grandma, Grandpa, Great Aunt Clarice, and Great Aunt Billie. I was enfolded by my grandparents and kissed. I wished Grandma a happy birthday and I offered to show her the ducks. Grandma said that she surely would be interested in seeing all those ducks she’d been hearing tell of. But before any organization toward such a duck quest could be mounted, two more cars pulled up, bringing Great Uncle Emmet; Great Aunt Rowena; Linda; Craig; Craig’s older brother, Brian; and Grandma’s cousin John D.
Our long kitchen table was covered with the pieced gingham tablecloth Mom had finished recently, and as soon as they walked through the door, Grandma, Clarice, Billie, and Rowena began cooing over it. The tablecloth was a patchwork of browns, reds, golds, and blues, each square about as big as a piece of toast. I had spent hours in the vicinity of the tablecloth’s manufacture—sometimes playing under the kitchen table even as Mom was sewing on top of it.
“It’s the first time we’re using it, Mildred,” Mom said. “In honor of your birthday.”
“Oh, well, I . . . it’s just wonderful.”
I looked at the tablecloth and touched it. It was wonderful. I hadn’t realized that before.
Then Grandma saw the cake and said, “Goodness gracious! That’s a pretty cake. Did you help make it, Jeremy?”
“No.”
“Now, Jeremy helped me do some baking while he was visiting us last month,” Grandma said, “so I know how good he is at it.”
“Is that so?” said Aunt Clarice. “Well, I’ll swan. Do you want to be a baker when you grow up, Jeremy?”
I shrugged.
At each place setting there was a pint jar of our home-canned goods—either apple butter, peach jelly, or tomato sauce. These were favors for our guests. And the top of each jar was decorated with a little skirt of fabric and labeled with the name of one guest. That was how everyone knew where to sit. Grandma sat at the head of the table at the far end, which was the important place to sit. Usually that’s where Grandpa sat. The windows and sunlit yard were behind her.
Us five kids sat at the card table in the study, and we could hear all the laughing and talking going on in the kitchen. Susan went into the kitchen for more rolls, but the adults said they were keeping all the rolls, and for some reason this made them laugh louder than they had laughed all day.
The cake was iced with whipped-cream frosting and had a drizzle of chocolate sauce that curtained down its sides. Mom had bought some new kind of candles—almost a foot long and about as thin as a strand of yarn—and we put all twenty of them into the cake and lit them. Despite their thinness, the candles burned with vigor, and as we sang “Happy Birthday” to Grandma—while I stood at her shoulder—what started