My Favorite Month
by Megan Cummings
Ah, Autumn. September is my favorite month of the year. Not only is it my birth month, but it was always the best month when I was growing up in Oregon.
Summer sucked because it was three months of fruit picking - a personal hell for a kid like me. I was too much of a daydreamer to focus on menial repetitive tasks. Others called me lazy, but I was really just misunderstood.
Now, for those of you who have never had the divine experience of being in the Willamette Valley, imagine low clouds, dew on everything, and 50 degrees six months of the year. Three months before winter solstice, and three months spring equinox. The time in between those, the temperature just drops 15 degrees. Not cold enough to snow, but too cold to do anything outdoors.
September is the last decent play-outdoors month. The air is crisp and smells like all the unpicked fruit left from summer, and school has just started. Every year I would get so excited for school, like a glutton for punishment. I would be looking forward to seeing Jake, my secret crush since kindergarten, looking forward to seeing old friends, and looking forward to befriending a New Kid. We’d get an average of three each year for our class of 70 or so. So during September I’d have someone with whom to pal around with while getting in fights with my old friends, and Jake would ask me how my summer was.
By the time October had rolled around, the New Kids would have realized how dreadfully uncool I was and would be hanging out with the Cool Kids. Jake would never speak to me again. I would again fall in to my old pattern of being ‘Megan the Smart One who will do all the work in group projects’, ‘Megan the Weirdo who creeps me out’, and ‘Megan the girl who embarrassed me last year.’
Now that I’m an adult, Jake has dated my sister for the last five years, there are millions of “New Kids”, and there is no fruit to pick. Despite all this, September is still my favorite month.
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