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# SEPTEMBER SUN
- URL: https://www.humanacre.com/september-sun/
- Published: 2026-09-11T17:20:55.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-11T17:20:55.000Z
- Author: Niall Maxwell

*Which season is this?*

Are these the remaining days of summer? Or just an untimely autumn sun? Bright but lethargic. Heat without passion. One last promise. One last promise. One last promise from a languishing lover.

There’s a want in the day. A call to some forgotten adventure. The low light falls across an old, rugged pine, conjuring the weather-beaten brow of a vigilant shepherd.

And then that one last promise dips behind the reaching pine spires, and beauty bows its blessed head, beckoning winter’s bleakness.

Yes. I know where I am now. It feels later than it should be. I am lost in time and out of time, all at the same time.

So much to do, and not enough day left to do it. Or is there?

Which season is this?

---

There is something unsettling about warmth that arrives when the light is already leaving. The body receives one message, the eye another. We sit in the sun and feel the summer, but the shadows have lengthened across the grass. Somewhere beyond the garden, someone is lighting a fire. We know what month it is. We are less certain what to make of it.

I recognise that uncertainty in myself. There are mornings when life feels expansive, when there is time to begin something substantial, to learn, to move, to love. By evening, without anything particularly significant having happened, the same life can feel alarmingly advanced. I am fifty. That fact changes its meaning according to the hour.

It feels later than it should be. I wonder about the “should” in that sentence. What arrangement did I think I had? Who promised that by this age certain things would be settled, that I would have found my place and learned how to inhabit it? Nobody, probably. Yet the expectation exists, and an ordinary September evening can expose it.

We learn to tell the time long before we understand what it means to have any. As children, an afternoon can be almost unmanageable in its length. Later, whole summers seem to pass while we are attending to something urgent. We remember particular moments, but cannot account for much of the interval. We were there. We must have been. There are photographs.

Perhaps some of the urgency comes from that unevenness. I can remember a childhood garden more vividly than last Tuesday. An old grief can arrive with the force of something that happened this morning. A possibility I have carried for twenty years can still feel new enough to postpone. Inside us, very little observes the calendar.

Outside, the light continues to move.

The pine does not resolve this for me. I would like to say that looking at it restores some natural wisdom, but mostly I stand there feeling the warmth diminish. There is beauty in that, certainly. There is also reluctance. I want another hour. I want the evening to remain available, even though I have made no particular plan for it.

That may be the difficult admission. Sometimes I want time because there is something I must do. Sometimes I want it because I cannot bear to see an opportunity close before I have decided what it was for.

And still, there are things to do. A page to finish. A call I have put off. Somewhere I keep saying I will go. They require actual hours, and those hours will have to come from a day much like this one. I cannot keep waiting for a season that announces itself without ambiguity.

The sun has gone behind the pine now. I could go inside and put the kettle on. I could take the walk while there is still enough light. Both are small enough decisions, yet here I am, hesitating, as though the evening might tell me which life I am in.