  I've tried to avoid telling you in so many words what a veteran of melancholia I am, but since two of my gentleman readers compared me to Sylvia Plath last night (thanks boys) I guess I'd better just get it out of the way. My similarities to Sylvia: 1. Poet 2. Mother 3. Loved a brooding poetic type in England long ago 4. Tendency for self to become brooding poetic type And there it ends.
Just so you know, I adore Sylvia, and her writing. I appreciate how she suffered, and I know she was sick. But I always end up hating Ted and feeling sorry for her kids. I can't help the poetic thing, by the way. I have been wired like that from day one. I had a professor who said thought is basically metaphor -- we compare what we see to what we know.
So as a small kid, younger than P, the leather of our couch became a gorilla's chest to me. An egg slicer was a guitar. My mother's hands were like birds. And so on and so on and so on. So I find myself extremely sensitive to things like weather. The weather has been like a sweater the past twenty four hours, and if there's a sun up there it's news to me.
That's bad. I need to use my happy lite when I get that feeling. Are there underlying issues? my therapist would say. Not really. We have no money, but that's always underlying.
My one cat seems to have transformed to elderly in a few short weeks. P is starting school again, after a summer of school with only around five kids in the class, and I'm girding myself for the fevers, puke flus and racking coughs that will be attendant with more kids there. I'm worrying about whether to get her a flu shot or not -- she should have it, but she's allergic to eggs. We have some appointments coming up. S is liking his job, working hard, a little tense, but generally treating me well and as an equal partner despite my histrionics and his gruffness. And I am looking forward to our shore getaway, and praying like crazy about the weather.
So . . . we've established that I'm probably not clinically depressed at this time. What could it be? I know what it is, because I smelled it for a moment the other day.
It's September. If I could skip from August to October, I would. Frankly, if I could skip from August to May, I'd do it and do it with a smile. I hate September. That's part of the reason I put the poem "Bavarian Gentians" by DH Lawrence in my favorite poem list. The first lines go something like, "Not every man has gentians in his house in soft September, in sad, slow Michaelmas.
" Sad, slow Michaelmas. Amen DH. My paternal grandmother died on the 13th; also S's birthday, so that's something happy to mitigate it. My mother, on the 21st. My stepsister's husband was tragically killed in September, I think it was the 30th. My maternal grandfather died also then.
Muppet, my favorite cat on this planet, died on the 27th. I'm sure I can think of more. Too many anniversaries and not enough sun. I never liked starting school, even before anyone died. I never liked the newness. I liked the confidence of November and the weeks after the boredom set in.
I have a bit of a hoptoad mind, so with my hands folded on that first day, I always remember thinking, in my way, "Good Lord, ten months in this room, I don't know how I'll be able to stand it. " I stood it. Somehow. I often wished the year began in September and not January; isn't it, after all, the time when everyone jettisons long days in barefeet under the sun, dreaming of fireflies and eating raspberries and spying on toads in the yard, for the hideousness of corduroys that are too hot to be wearing and a teacher that barks, "Wipe that smirk off your face? " Then there's the smell. Alix in Wunderland asked me on email about the smell and why it bothered me, and I promised her I'd post on it.
Before the smell are the geese, and they go over in arrows, honking. Then you're in the mood for cider. Mini pumpkins appear on the Rowhouse steps (though last year, the !&$#&$* squirrels ate mine, while everyone else's remained untouched! ) The garden flag has to be switched to something with a cornucopia on it. Out with the petunias, in with the mums. The lawn service dudes, with their sleeves of tattoos, come once or twice more and leave a note that says, "See you in the spring!
" Anonymous Rowhouse Road, which was a thoroughfare only for transients, shopping center ancients, and girls that touch their hair and adjust their short-short wedgies every two seconds as they sashay by all summer long, becomes a lane for little people heading to St. Nextdoor around the corner. Then comes the smell. Here is the smell: apples, frost, early dusk, old leaves and their fruity crispiness, getting up early and driving in traffic, no more sleeping late, the bumblebees gone from the garden, and a great big dollop of sad. Like standing at the cemetery looking down at my mom's name, with a rust-colored container of mums in my hand. Like thinking about every time so far in my thirty three years that everything forever changed, and what I planned to do about what remained. 
