September

On Now: What I'm reading, how time tells the truth, and the ache of wanting

September was Spanish moss hanging from oak trees and singing lullabies on the beach. It was poison ivy and insomnia and laughing anyway. It was reading my memoir in the emergency room and trying not to cry. It was my son’s sweaty head and grilled nectarines and pitchers of garden tomatoes. It was finding my child self in the pages of Demon Copperhead and feeling the gnawing ache of want that comes with being a child of not one but two addicts. It was fog and hymns in the mornings and the sound of my son’s laugh. It was chalk paintings on the porch and jumping on the trampoline well into the dark. It was brown butter and sticky figs and popping Prosecco in the mountains that are always blue. It was writing about home and nothing else. It was hugs from my grandmother and kissing her face that looks like mine, that looks like my son's. It was olive oil ice cream and my son’s chocolate-covered mouth. It was being happy for someone else’s dreams even when they’re no longer your dreams. It was jumping in rain puddles at sunset and Venus outside my window. It was taking a ferry during a tropical storm warning and singing Happy Birthday to my husband. It was tangerine skies that turned to black and seventy-mile-an-hour winds. It was the blue heron and the taste of salt and seashells in my palm. It was new friends and new possibilities and letting myself hope again. It was lighthouses and blueberry-stained tongues and the stonecrop flower in varying shades of pink. It was city hotel rooms and apartments by the sea and reading books in beds that weren’t mine. It was holding onto summer and my son and this home that is ours, that is us.