There is absolutely nothing more refreshing than the sound of a Mourning Dove singing about the cold, crisp morning air on a rainy September Sunday. I have felt a sensation of peace and ease wash over me as of recent, and a deep relief, one I’ve been waiting eagerly and greedily for this entire summer, has been exhaled out from within me. I feel calm. I feel revived. I feel myself breathing in inspiration the way I did years and years ago, like the day I was 12 and had just been gifted my very own, very used, 1990s Dell laptop for my juvenile writing and inexperienced poetry. What a great surprise! I feel now the same rush of words, thoughts, and emotions I felt that day, the very day I realized how fast I can write words with a keyboard. I am still astonished at how quickly I manage to note down my ideas on a laptop than how I do in a notebook. My fingers do appreciate the upgrade.

My Septembers tend to be filled with new beginnings; new interests, new flavors, new limits — I find myself reminiscing about my childhood, the parts that were colorful and the parts that were dreary, and I grasp the nostalgia found somewhere in the middle of the two. I also find myself dreaming of my future and each way I can see it play out one lucky day ahead. This pattern reunites with me each time the tree’s leaves blush and the autumn breeze returns after a hot, hot summer of waiting for Godot.

This September was one of particular inspiration, and I found the auburn trees and the out-of-season flowers crushed and sprawled across the pavement more beautiful than ever. They reminded me of the dwindled color and flattened texture of Pre-Raphaelite landscapes and the women inhabiting them. The foggy, romantic apathy in John Everett Millais’s “Ophelia,” and the dewey morning air I could almost taste from John William Waterhouse’s “Hylas and the Nymphs.” Arthur Prince Spears’s “Titania” reminds me of days I’d somehow find myself deep in the trees as a child, and how I felt them protect me from the sun’s harsh rays with their leafy tops. I could only wish to feel as free and dreamy as Shakespeare’s Titania had, queens of the fairies.