Fall brings hope for new year

In the spirit of the season, I’m making my New Year’s resolutions; looking forward to the future, a fresh start and a new beginning.

The way I see it, no matter what the calendar says, September is when the New Year begins.

It is a month that brings promise wrapped in a new school year; a chance to be a new person; to wipe the slate clean and begin again. A chance to learn and grow.

I have a September birthday and that probably has a lot to do with how I feel. As a child, just after Labor Day, I woke up early and dressed in the new school clothes that were usually part of my birthday gifts.

My curls, tangled and wild all summer, were brushed into submission and pulled tightly away from my face.

Stepping out of my house, into a landscape that was turning red and gold and apple crisp at the edges, I walked, eagerly, back to school.

Moving up a grade was always complicated. It meant that old friends might not have made it into the new classroom with me. But, it also meant a new friend might have.

A new grade-level meant facing a teacher who was an unknown quantity; a stranger with his or her own expectations, with a new way of doing things and the power to make life in the classroom exciting and wonderful, or as oppressive as a prison sentence.

Each year brought music class, art lessons and thick literature books full of wonderful stories. Geography and history, with their maps of the world and tales of explorers and adventurers, was thrilling.

Of course, it wasn’t all fun. Math defeated me. Tests made me anxious. Homework made me mad.

But even so, I looked forward to each new school year.

Even after graduation, when I joined the working world, my response to September was the same.

I bought new pencils or a new book bag, or even new clothes. The professional adults around me might have ceased to mark the season this way, but I celebrated the way I always had.

When my children came along and the school calendar ruled my schedule again, I held their hands as they went into first grade.

When they got older and began to drag their feet, moaning about the end of the summer and complaining about going back to school, I was doubly annoying because I couldn’t hide my excitement. I still can’t.

Oh, sure, by winter, when the days are gray and cold, by the time the true New Year is upon us, I’ve faded.

I long for spring and a break from the routine.

I want to bask in the summer sun, enjoying the slow pace and the freedom from the relentless schedule.

But it never fails; each year when the first yellow pencils, packages of college rule paper and white plastic bottles of Elmers school glue appear in the stores, the feeling returns.

I look at white cotton blouses, cardigan sweaters and plaid skirts that remind me of school uniforms.

I want to buy a big new box – the kind with the sharpener on the side – of Crayola crayons.

I want to walk home scuffing my new shoes through a carpet of curled, crimson leaves on the sidewalk.

I want to read the classics. I want to lose myself in the books I loved when I was a child; books by Mark Twain and Jane Austen, even the adventures of Sally, Dick and Jane.

I want to buy a new lunchbox, the kind with a thermos, and eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that have been cut into quarters.

I want to make a new friend.

When the restlessness of autumn, the excitement at the waning of summer and the advent of fall washes over me, what I want is to go back to school. The way I went back to school when I was a child, eager and enthusiastic.

Sometimes, I do. Some years I sign up for a class. Other Septembers, I just pick a subject that interests me and buy a book.

But I always open my new calendar, an academic calendar that spans the year from August to August, and by drawing a red circle around a number, wish myself a happy birthday.

And a happy New Year.