Grassy Waters Preserve is a natural wetlands ecosystem not far from where we live. It serves as the freshwater supply for West Palm Beach, but it also serves as a place where one can experience Florida’s great big sky, a place where the big sky is reflected in water below. Seth was out there for work one day recently; while he was there, he took the photograph that is the cover star for your Convivio Book of Days Calendar for September. The calendar is our monthly gift to you, a good companion to this blog, one that you can print on standard US letter size paper and pin to your bulletin board or stick on the refrigerator door, reminding you of the ceremony of a day.
This is what our sky often looks like this time of year, and for those who say we have no seasons I would counter with the notion that this is a September sky, a hold out from our summer skies, and it looks nothing like our winter skies. Summer holds on for a while longer here than in other places. Our seasonal shifts are subtle.
It is, nonetheless, a month of seasonal shifting: Autumn arrives by the almanac, this year on the 22nd. There are days that are weather markers: Matthew’s Day, bright and clear / Brings good wine in the next year is the general thought on St. Matthew’s Day, just before that day of equinox. It is a month of balance: day and night will be pretty much equal come that third week, but the balance is ephemeral; the planet keeps shifting in its seat and we enter the darker time of year here in the Northern Hemisphere. Even that sky will shift: Come October, we’ll see a lot fewer days that look like that.
Shifting planets and skies you can view by looking down as much as you can by looking up? Wonderful stuff. I wish you a month of wonder, too.