September is a liminal time. Some days, summer still lingers in the air.  Yet, there are other days – increasingly so - when the suddenly chilly winds stir the changing leaves and send us scrambling for our sweaters. 

August is sun and heat. It is vegetation, sere-edged and crisp underfoot; and it is fruit nearing ripeness on the tree.  And sometimes, often with little warning, it is the punch and wonder of a late-summer thunder storm.

Twilight in July is a mystical and liminal time. Within its shadows mingle the vestiges of the day’s bright, hot glory and the night’s hushed, fragrant promise of soothing respite. July evenings bridge and blend two distinct environments and, in so doing, create a new one all its own.

June’s gifts are rich and dazzling. Indeed, after the sun finally has set on these, the longest, loveliest days of the year, June lavishes us further with magic.

As the second Sunday of May approaches, mothers – all those literal, legal, and figurative mothers who bore us or reared us or mentored us – fill our minds.  May your thoughts at this time be joyful and multitudinous. And, if they are not, may nature, popularly personified as the ultimate maternal figure,  provide you with inspiration and solace.

Such a luscious month in New England that it seems akin to blasphemy to mark its start with a day to celebrate pranks and fools. Let’s, instead, look to April’s twenty-nine other days, each one ripe with nature’s promise and National Poetry Month’s poems. Let’s emulate poet Louise Berliner and “follow the tangle and the tendril” into the serious delight and enlightenment the rest of April has on offer.

The first day of March marks the start of meteorological spring. Yesterday, on a stroll around the Acton Arboretum, I came upon a clutch of snowdrops, the first I’ve seen this season.  Their white petals, delicately edged in the green of summer grass, nodded to a ground still winter bleak and bare. All about us the world is awakening, from low to the ground to high above in the blue-lit sky.

February is full of surprises. Just when you think the snow will never end, you awaken to a balmy thaw. The pond, once frozen solid, is suddenly set free in startled dishevelment. Yes, February is nature’s roller coaster ride: Unpredictable and fast - just like life.

The first, fresh days of any new year are bittersweet. They find us, like that image of the god of doorways, gazing both forward into a waxing, beckoning future and back into a waning past of joys and sorrows which still cling like fragments from a dream. . .

December descends upon us with cold finality. The year is nearly over. The nights are the longest they will ever be. Outside, away from the comfort and joy of festive merriment, it is a contemplative time, a time of letting go. And - because life is a paradox - it is a singularly poignant time for holding on, as well.

We New Englanders know well the sorrow of November: The darkness of foreshortened days, the decay of frost-blackened blooms, the fresh grief of an empty place at the Thanksgiving table. Robert Frost, too, knew November’s sorrow; but, as he reveals in this month’s featured poem, he also knew its beauty.

October, unlike its predecessor September, dares us to ignore time’s passing.  The buoyant, carefree hues of summer have intensified and turned to flames. The days shorten. The air grows crisp. The calendar year nears its end.  Yet, as October reminds us, eternal youth is not the point – not for nature, not even for us.