September

Every September, the wind that left with the arrival of the muggy summer comes back with a vengeance as the students return. The dead air of the summer is hot and humid, and the quiet melting streets of August become chaotic and cool with the heavy steps of the returning undergrads. September creeps up with angry gusts blowing so hard that our summer clothes are covered with sweaters and coats, as if this small town knows that for the next eight months it will have no peace. It doesn’t matter how strong the winds are, or how difficult a time it makes for the students to walk to class comfortably… they will not leave. They will stay as they do every year, and despite their complaints of the same bars and the same mall, the same small town gossip and the same rules to break, they cannot abandon it here.

After busy months of papers and finals, the summer arrives and they happily escape for four months. Taking their belongings but leaving pieces of themselves here. They leave them here because it is safe. Not safe from caddy girls or deceitful boys or unreasonable professors. Not safe from the pressures of classes and grades, not safe from the stress of tuition and loans. Not even safe from the pressure to conform, to judge, to pry. But safe from the real world.

Safe from true independence and from the inevitability of what our lives will be. Safe in the sense that it is all familiar, whether we like it or not. Whether we like the people we see on campus or the places we must pass everyday, there is safety, and maybe even comfort, in this familiarity. Safety in the predictability of it all. Safe because we know it here so well, because this is the first place our lives became really ours. Our decision to go to class. Our decision to sleep through the alarm. Our decision to drag ourselves to the pub. Our decision to make friends or enemies, our mistakes. Our triumphs and victories, our tragedies and failures. Our darkest nights and our happiest days were all here. So it is our town. It holds our memories and keeps them for us until we return.

The wind will blow for months. Eagerly blustering in hopes that it will slow us down. It will squall until the spring comes and it realizes that we aren’t capable of being calmed. The winds will eventually become still with the new season, as if all along, deep down, this town of ours knew how we really felt about it. Beneath the hurtful words of the students about the banality of this place, our complaints and dramatized speeches of its ordinariness, our town knows how we hold it in great esteem. After the broken bottles on its grounds and our drunken footprints on its grasses, it knows the simplicity of our love for it.

It is as if this town knows that it holds our dearest friends and the admired establishment where our knowledge blossomed. It knows when our time has passed we will look back fondly and smile, knowing that it was our time. Before we hand this place over to a new crop of naïve freshmen who will make it their own, it is our time. It is when we are truly entitled to call it ours, so we must make the most of it. This is where we become who we are, where we learn how to leap out of the safety of its quaintness, and into the reality of the world. Out of the bubble of Antigonish and into the unknown. We have leaned on this school for years, all the while without us knowing, it has taught us to stand upright on our own.

So every summer when the students leave the wind in the town ceases, its Jekyll-like serenity reappearing. It grasps tightly onto the lingering memories of the students who love this place so much, despite their grumblings. Until the Autumn season approaches, and our beloved town becomes enraged once more with the thought of the mayhem that comes with September, and the winds of Hyde blow strong through the streets, lasting until it can forget the disorder we have caused.

It is a cyclical ritual, only truly known by those who are fortunate enough to nomadically live here. A gift given to us by this town that is hard to explain and not easily shared with outsiders, as they can never understand the beauty and intricacies of this small town and its quirks. It is a gift that will be carried within every student for the rest of our lives, that will put a sly smile on our face, because we know something that everyone else doesn’t. This gift will be not only the X’s on our fingers, but the warmth in our hearts that can only come from this place, knowing that even when it is no longer our time, it will still be home.