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September has always felt a little like the beginning of a new year to me.
January may have the calendar on its side, but it arrives in the middle of winter when, if I am honest, I mostly want to stay indoors, keep warm and recover from Christmas. September feels different. There is something about it that carries a sense of expectation. The long days of summer begin to fade, normal routines return, and life seems to acquire a shape again.
Here in the UK, you can almost feel the change happening after what has been the hottest summer on record.
The mornings are becoming slightly crisper. When I left the house this morning, for the first time in months, I wondered whether I should have taken a jumper. Shops have now started displaying things that seem suspiciously autumnal, and somewhere in the distance, Christmas is already clearing its throat.
Then the schools go back.
My teenage children have spent the last six weeks telling me they had no homework, and are now panicking about how much they have to do. They have also apparently spent weeks forgetting that mornings exist, and now suddenly have alarms to set again. Uniforms to find and friends to be reunited with one another. Family life will once again settle back into patterns that disappeared almost completely during the summer holidays.
Yet there is something slightly strange about calling it a beginning. Because nature seems to be doing precisely the opposite.
The trees are beginning to change colour. Leaves that were bright green only a few weeks ago are gradually becoming yellow, orange and brown. Gardens that have been scorched by the sun are once again slowing down. The warmth of summer, however reluctant we may be to admit it, is disappearing.
Everything around us appears to be winding down. Yet somehow, September still feels full of possibility.
I have been thinking about that contradiction over the last few days, and it brought me back to an easily overlooked promise near the end of the story of Noah.
After the flood has finally receded, Noah leaves the ark and builds an altar. Then God makes a promise about the future of the earth:
“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”
It is one of those verses I have probably read many times without paying much attention to it.
Yet as we begin September, I keep being reminded of it.
