I
On this penultimate day of August, I am blessed with an early September light as I take breakfast at noon on the patio. This light on the canopy of trees that tower over my neighborhood and wrap it in brilliant shades of green is among the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. I have been contemplating the beauty of this light on warm, blue-sky days every September for half a century now. I know no more beautiful place to be than in it.
After breakfast I continue looking at the light filtering through millions of leaves as they rustle in the wind. For decades I have wanted to write about it, but I have been afraid it might be more sadly beautiful than I am capable of setting down on paper. I am, after all, not Keats or Cheever. Even when I trained my camera on this light, my photographs never did it justice.
Right now I am thinking this light is like the hug of someone dearly beloved who is about to leave for a very long time, maybe forever. Can anyone capture the pressing together of two bodies, of people who will not see each other for years, maybe ever, but who in this moment have their arms wrapped around each other, eyes looking into another’s they might never see again? I have known one such moment and have never gotten it down on paper. But all one can do in this life of broken and unrealized dreams is try. This is my attempt to remember September light from years gone by.
II
The first time I noticed September light was more than 60 years ago, and it wasn’t in September but on an early August day when I was 19. It was about noon when I emerged from the house-trailer we called our summer home on a lake an hour’s drive north of Chicago. After walking for a short time, I noticed the light was different than I expected it to be. I was looking up at the tops of the trees beyond the boundary of the park, at the trees and the sky and the way the light fell upon the leaves and the lawn and the sides of the trailers. The light was thinner and whiter than it should have been, and everything the light fell upon seemed whiter and more radiant than I had noticed ever before. It was a moment of stark beauty the likes of which I had never seen. But I noticed something else: that in this beauty was also a sadness, something I had never felt when looking at light. I was looking at autumn while we were still in early August. I was looking at the end of things while we were still in the middle of them.
But I did not think any of this on that day. I was simply dumbstruck by such a feeling on a blue-sky, perfect day in the middle of summer. It was so far out of sync with anything I knew that I stood, almost in a trance, staring at this light as if staring at it would make me understand what was happening. But it did not. I only felt the light and beauty and sadness, and it was all one. I had no words for what I was looking at. I simply stood mutely between two rows of trailers looking at this strange light all around me, feeling the coming loss of summer. When I could find no words for this experience, I continued wherever I was headed as if nothing had happened. And this evanescent moment passed from half-consciousness into unconsciousness. For the next eight years I never saw this light again, nor did I once remember that moment. It fled like a butterfly from a dream.
Eight years later, after I had escaped a job I dreaded in a printing plant, I took my bachelor’s degree in English and enrolled in graduate school. One night during my last course for my master’s degree, a course on Whitman and Dickinson, I was paying more attention to the professor’s French-inhaling of his cigarettes than to his words, when suddenly out of his world-weary mouth came the most unexpected sentence I could have imagined: “Emily Dickinson has a poem about that day at the height of summer when we first realize summer is coming to an end.”
I was stunned. It was as if his words had parentheses of empty space a mile wide at either end. They might as well have been hermetically sealed. This world-weary, French-inhaling professor had just rolled the stone away from a moment I had found and lost for myself eight years earlier. I had found it because I was a dreamy kid who saw things in soft focus. I lost it because I had no context for understanding it, no way to articulate it, no ability to turn it into insight. So it had fled into the cubby hole of my unconscious mind for eight years. Now that moment was before me again, verified by no less an authority than Emily Dickinson.
Sitting in the classroom that night, I once again saw that prematurely thin light upon the leaves and lawn and trailers that I had seen eight years before. Once more I felt the union of light, beauty and sadness that had struck me so powerfully but so briefly when I was 19. I became again the lost youth I had been, walking along the edge of a trailer park on a perfect summer day. I became again a gawky kid in an aimless life. How long I lingered on this memory I do not know. I only know I was astonished to have the moment appear before me again after all those years.
So it was that I first understood the sadness that lives in the beauty of September light, even though it had come before it was yet September.
III
Four years later I noticed it again. I had been traveling in Europe for nearly three months, the first month alone, the second month with my first wife and two sons — a third would be born two years later — and the last month alone again. I arrived home on September 2, 1971, and was the happiest man in the world to be reunited with my family.
A few days later I took my older son, then 21/2 years old, out for a bicycle ride. The child-carrier was mounted on the handlebars, so as we rode I watched the light on the trees and the houses we were passing, and also on my son. He was learning language then, and after a while, he blurted out, “Some kinda birdie go caw-caw; udder kinda birdie go peep-peep.” I was astonished at his perception and his words. Where had such perceptive words come from? I had no idea. He was just a sweet-faced boy with large brown eyes spouting a startling perception out of nowhere.
He is now 54 and a well-known and much-respected basketball coach with three children of his own, all much older now than he was then. But in my heart, I still see this open-faced boy and his sweet, perceptive words as he spoke them into the light of that September afternoon. Just as we can’t keep our children children forever, but must let them go into the vagaries of their futures and the honey of our memories, so September light tells us we must let go of everything we have cherished, all the most beautiful things and times and places and people we have loved, and finally our very lives. But September light also tells us: not just yet. The beauty we remember and perceive is still ours a little longer.
IV
My favorite September light came 43 years later — six months before the end of my wife Kathy’s life. It was September 2014, and she was then 10 years into Alzheimer’s disease. She had almost no language anymore, but she could see when people looked at her with love and would gush back some of the only words she still knew — “Oh, thank you!” — just for looking at her with love. She sat as she had sat many earlier Septembers on our patio in the chair kitty-corner to mine as we took breakfast at noon. On some of those September days the sun would put her face in its light. Once during that last September I was so moved I took a picture of the light on her face. I don’t have to look at that picture to see it again. I have it memorized.
The smile that light caught is now gone from this world. Kathy died six months later. But that September light is here once again. Each day at noon, during breakfast alone, I watch it lying upon the empty white chair she once sat in. It will return each year long after I am gone, and for those who have eyes to see it, it will tell anew of the beautiful end of dreams, realized and unrealized, that have come and gone or are on their way out. It is at once the most beautiful and saddest light I have ever seen.
V
All things must end. All lives must end. This is not news, except to the one dying or the one losing a loved one, a loved home, a loved life. If it has lasted long, our hearts may be broken — but that is what we are here for, to have dreams and, if we are lucky, to have those dreams come true, and then, inevitably, to have them taken from us. That is why we are here, and that is the language September light speaks to us without words. It tells us we have been on loan and that love and beauty have also been on loan, and that soon the loan will be up and the breath will go out of the dream. And yet, it holds us by the sleeve and tells us: For a little time more, we still have the light, we still have the dream.
Mel Livatino lives in Evanston, Illinois. A regular contributor to this magazine, he has published in The Sewanee Review, Portland magazine and other journals. Since 2004, 12 of these pieces have been named notable essays of the year by the series Best American Essays, and he has recorded nearly 50 of them for Recorded Recreational Reading for the Blind in Sun City, Arizona.