Support the Timberjay by making a donation.

Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

September brings the Harvest Moon, in more ways than one

Nancy Jo Tubbs
Posted 9/4/14

September is a gentle month around here. The mosquitos’ buzzing and bites aren’t keeping us awake at night, and guests don’t feel quite so urgent about landing walleye. They’re more aware …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

Log in

September brings the Harvest Moon, in more ways than one

Posted

September is a gentle month around here. The mosquitos’ buzzing and bites aren’t keeping us awake at night, and guests don’t feel quite so urgent about landing walleye. They’re more aware that the joy of fishing doesn’t necessarily rely on catching. Last week a couple came back to shore grinning after intermittent pounding downpours. It was great, they said. We had raincoats and we pulled the boat up safely under some overhanging island trees. Burntside was churning black, then brilliant blue on the way home across the lake.

September used to be the month of excitement about buying notebooks with our favorite TV characters on them and getting back to school with a sense that A’s and B’s on report cards, football games, laughing with friends out by the lockers—all good things were possible. But, ever since September became the month of 9/11, it’s been a reminder of terror and vulnerability for some of us. It doesn’t help that war news from the Middle East continues to evoke a persistent sucking sound and sinking feeling.

September deserves more balance, including a rasher of joy. After all, Ely has the Harvest Moon Festival starting September 5. Hearing Ted Feyder sing “If I Can Grow Old in Ely” cranks my happiness quotient right up every time. Add the Gawboy Family Dancers, funnel cakes, sidewalk sales and the chance to wander among the 125 vendors selling irresistible handmade chatchkes, and for an afternoon my joy indicator flies off the graph.

I’m letting calls from the depressing side of life go straight to voice mail. Happy things to think about in September: It’s the month of the 55th TV anniversary of the Mickey Mouse Club, Lassie and Bonanza. I remember writing a letter to my dad when I was about eight that said, “What ever you do, be sure to watch Rin Tin Tin.” To be exact, Rinty didn’t broadcast on TV until October of 1954.

One of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, was born in September in 1935, and thank goodness she wrote a poem called “Wild Geese” that starts, “You do not have to be good. /You do not have to walk on your knees/For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting./You only have to let the soft animal of your body/love what it loves.”

That’s what I’m talkin’ about. September is a time to love what we love and take the sweet with the bitter.

Ice cream, for example. September 22 is the anniversary of the creation of the ice cream cone by an Italian immigrant named Italo Marchiony who made lemon ice and popped it into cones to sell from his pushcart in New York City.

Babe Ruth hit his first professional home run in September 100 years ago.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, in September of 1896 and went on to write profound novels staggering with both despair and jubilance, at least one of which we must have read in high school here in his home state.

His first novel was turned down and his girlfriend Zelda dumped him. In Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac” we read, “Fitzgerald was probably much like most young men of his generation who dreamed of being a football star, the war hero, the wealthy big shot, the guy who gets the girl, but he actually had talent, drive, and an unshakeable faith that he could translate all that familiar yearning into something new. His revised book, This Side of Paradise, was a triumphant success. Requests for his writing came pouring in, Zelda married him, and the two of them — a Midwesterner and a Southerner — became the quintessential New York couple, the epitome of the Jazz Age, a term Fitzgerald himself coined. And although they eventually died separated, she in a mental hospital, he in debt and obscurity, Fitzgerald’s two greatest regrets remained, for the rest of his life, having failed to serve overseas and play Princeton football.”

He said, “The test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

So summer is sadly ending, but what ho, September is the birth month of James Van Allen, an American scientist who discovered the radiation belts that surround the earth and help to explain our lustrous northern lights. It turns out that a stream of charged particles from the sun is trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field, the inner and outer Van Allen radiation belts.

The scientific explanation goes on for pages, but to let the eyes love what they love, it’s easiest to see the aurora right now (rather than at 2 a.m.) by checking out local photographer Heidi Pinkerton’s web page called The Night Sky. The mind rejoices at the sight of luminous sails, a tidal wave of color and bursts of angel wings reaching up into our very own night sky.

Let’s hear it for our loveable northern Minnesota September. The loons are flocking, maples show their first red bursts, and the cool nights bring the fresh, keen breath of autumn.

The joys of September belong to us all. I think Mary Oliver said it well.

“Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,/are heading home again./Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,/the world offers itself to your imagination,/ calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—/over and over announcing your place/in the family of things.”