Feeling like fall: September means better days ahead

September is a time for spiders — and spider lilies.
It’s a month for cool breezes on hot days.
Soft wildflowers and hard-hitting football.
Salty boiled peanuts and sweet Oriental persimmons.
Flickers of color in green woods.
Hummingbirds and butterflies, fall gardens and food plots.
September is not a perfect month. It’s hot and dry and love-buggy. But it plays a crucial role.
It’s the John the Baptist of months, ushering in the perfection of fall.
* * *
September woods are full of spiders.
If you go walking, break off a sweetgum limb to wave in front of you.
There are big black spiders with vivid yellow markings, big yellow spiders with vivid black markings, and strange little crab-like fellers with white blotches. All of them display more intricacy than anything created by human hands.
Cicadas hum louder and more rhythmically than they have all year. Spicebush and tiger swallowtail butterflies swarm blossoms, hunting nectar.
Love bugs thicken the air, gumming up windshields, grills and front bumpers.
Mosquitoes are scarce, thanks to dry conditions. But gnats are biting, and wood ticks still roam.
* * *
Dry?
The beaver lake at Ethel Vance Natural Area has become a weed bed. Sandbars on local streams sprout grass where water used to lap. Bare orange clay rims pond edges.
Farmers take advantage of these conditions to bale hay. Gardeners sow tiny seeds of mustard, turnip and collard. Hunters disk up food plots when they’re not blasting away at doves or scouting for deer.
In the woods, black gum trees are the first species to flicker with yellow and orange, followed by sweet gum. Green cypress needles turn to rust.
But the color changes remain slight. Though fall arrived last week, this isn’t New England.
* * *
September is when naked ladies appear. That’s the slang term for spider lilies, so called because they lack leaves.
The slender green stalks appear in yards and sprout glorious coral-red flowers on top.
Roadsides and creek banks inkle with wildflowers, morning glories and goldenrod and purple asters.
Hummingbirds spear flowers as they get ready for the long migration south across the Gulf of Mexico.
Crops like muscadines and pawpaws have waned, but giant Oriental persimmons and jumbo green peanuts are coming in.
The persimmons dangle like soft orange baseballs, and when you bite into one the juice smears your chin with the taste of candied fall.
Boiled peanuts, a Deep South delicacy strangely unknown in other regions, yield to the teeth and melt on the tongue, salty and juicy. Once you’re addicted there’s just no stopping.
* * *
Football season might start in August, but it’s not until the cool breezes of September arrive that the fever really hits.
There’s probably no rational explanation for the ecstatic feeling that comes from the thought of sitting on uncomfortable bleachers while a bunch of young men in uniforms and plastic helmets dart back and forth after an inflated piece of pigskin.
But the joy is real, as real as the smell of popcorn and the fizz of cold cola, the whiff of a distant cigar, the drum rolls and blare of brass bands, the cheer of crowds, the chatter of friends.
* * *
September is not the best month, not in the Deep South anyway.
Afternoons still reach into the 90s. If mosquitoes don’t get you, biting gnats will.
You’re fooling yourself if you think it’s time to go camping.
But September is what it is.
It’s the transition from summer to fall. It’s a breath of relief after the relentless heat of August. It washes over us like cool water.
September reminds us that things aren’t as bad as we thought, and they’re going to get better.
Count on it.