As this column takes shape for publication in September, the year carries a certain paradox. Three quarters of its days already belong to summer, yet September arrives with the crisp breath of autumn. August seems to fade in the speaker’s hands, not because it ends, but because time itself is measured and weighed with an almost stubborn insistence. The calendar pretends to conquer the river of days, but it is not that simple. Time behaves like a living presence, neither generous nor stingy, and yet somehow always a touch unfair, slipping away when one hopes to hold onto it and lingering when it is best forgotten. We stamp the years with a sense of loss or carelessness, as if every moment lived is a ledger entry, a receipt for what could have been. The rhythm of weeks can feel glacial, while decades rush forward with astonishing speed, a paradox that invites reflection rather than exploitation. In dialogue with this paradox, the year is structured by the familiar pivot of September 1, the moment many return to routines, and the factories, shops, and offices reopen after their summer hush. If one accepts the observation of a friend that August is a kind of Sunday of the year, then September is the Monday that follows, a reset that carries both gravity and inevitability.
From the window through which the scene is observed, a window that doubles as a quiet inner gaze, the summer light remains outside, stubborn and patient. It lingers at the doorway, a patient guest who refuses to leave on cue, spending hours perched on the branches of the lemon tree, soaking into the air and the walls, muttering in the language of light about doors yet to be opened, or perhaps already forgotten. The light’s retreat is never complete; it exits with a companionable sigh, leaving behind a memory of warmth and a hint that it will return, perhaps soon, perhaps later in another form, another doorway, another season. The scene is a gentle invitation to notice the cadence of days and the way a single beam can stretch across a room, turning ordinary moments into a small, bright ritual.
On the shore, the last girl of the season folds herself into a sudden shiver beneath a towel, a delicate reminder that change is near. The sea, still blue, bears the marks of the sun in coppery tones, and the light lays itself across the sand with a soft, metallic sheen. Yet even as the coast reads like a catalog of endings and beginnings, there is also a quiet recommencement. It is time to start again, to let the familiar rhythms reassert themselves and to honor what is ordinary, settled, and true. The ordinary acts—warm showers after a day at the beach, a kitchen filled with the steady comfort of routine, soup returned to the table, and coffee that no longer needs to be chilled—reassert their place. September appears as a perpetual recurrence, a cycle that repeats with a reassuring regularity but with enough difference each year to remind one that renewal is not a mere repetition but a re-creation. Children return to classrooms not as a simple return to habit but as participants in the ongoing story of learning and growth, each one carrying a personal shift into the new term. The season thus settles in, not as a rigid deadline, but as a familiar friend who returns with new stories and the familiar sense that time can be both predictable and surprising at once, offering a chance to adjust, adapt, and begin again with each September that comes to inhabit the calendar of days.