I think when and if I leave this earth, even if I wind up in a nifty afterlife locale, my spirit will feel the pull to return here for awhile every September.

There is a certain something in the soft light and scent of a September afternoon that is hard for me to wrap my arms around with a word. The closest I’ve ever come is “wistfulness,” but of the sweeter variety. 

The playwright Eugene O’Neill had one of his characters (Edmund Tyrone, a stand-in for his young self) describe himself as “a little in love with death.” Maybe those of us who are romantically involved with September are a little in love with “a yearning, a desire, tinged with melancholy,” as my dictionary defines wistfulness.

When the author Stephen Crane died of tuberculosis (they called it “consumption” in those days) at the age of 29, it was reported that his last words were, “When you come to the hedge that we must all go over, it isn’t so hard. You feel sleepy, you don’t care. Just a little dreamy anxiety about which world you’re in. That’s all.” September is like that for me, a shimmering ephemera between the season of warmth and light and that of cold and darkness.

There have been some rituals I have practiced over the years to venerate September.

I have, for instance, tried to make it down to New York City and take a boat ride around the island of Manhattan. Some would say you can’t really experience nature in NYC because it has been pushed aside and/or crushed by all the people and buildings and cement and asphalt. But I think maybe nature is more of a treasure there because it is so measured.

On a September afternoon a quarter-century ago, I was in a boat on the East River, and the building where Irving Berlin had lived was pointed out to me. What I felt at that moment went far beyond my not being able to encapsulate it with a word. In fact, that moment expanded and evolved into a one-act play entitled “Irving Berlin’s View of the East River,” that was produced ashore on West 54th Street in Manhattan. This past year it was made into a short film, the opening pan of which is the very view of the East River that Irving Berlin had from his living quarters. In the play and the film, one of the characters speaks of an “achingly glorific” September day that is “tender, wistful, forgiving.”

Although the credits for the film say the screenplay was written by the producer/director Sarah Knight and me, September was an uncredited co-writer. 

Since I live in the Five College area, students flock here around the first day of September as predictably as do swallows return to Capistrano around the first day of spring. I am sometimes fortunate to get close enough to the actors in this high drama to eavesdrop on the parting words of parents to their offspring before they drive off. Among the most memorable and picturesque I ever heard were a father saying to his son, “I don’t want to look online and see you standing in the bed of a pick-up truck, with no clothes on, next to a beer keg.”

Another one of my September rituals has been to take a bike ride on “my route” from Hatfield to Whately, to Sunderland, down through North Hadley, to Hadley, through a clip of Northampton, and back to the center of Hatfield. I once wrote that heaven may be different from that route in the September sunlight, but not by much.                    

There is a cemetery in North Hadley where I always stop when I take that route. I can sit in the grass, take a drink of water, and let the folks who reside at that burial ground say what they have to say to me. It seems as if I can hear them better in September, especially as I get older. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a short story entitled “Winter Dreams” that was part of my inspiration to write. I think those dreams that come to us in the lassitude of winter gestate into the possibilities of spring, and reach what fruition reality allows them to reach in the lushness of summer. It is in September that our dreams can find rest, and it is in September that I can lie down beside them.

Amherst resident Richard McCarthy, a longtime columnist at the Springfield Republican, writes a monthly column for the Gazette.