The ConVal football team was on the practice pitch as I drove by the other day, players scrimmaging with helmets on, and coaches buzzing around them like worker bees around a hive. Suddenly, I felt the arrival of fall and the start of a new year. Fear not, a good stretch of summer remains. Temperatures are cooling, but the sun still beats down at noon, and the water remains inviting for anyone who wants in. But there was the football team mustering for pre-season practice – last year’s juniors this year’s captains; last year’s potentials, this year’s starters. For me, as always, it signaled the beginning of the new year—the actual new year, when each person’s token has a chance to advance one or two squares on the board.
Think about it: The official start to the new year, January 1, brings nothing to the table. It lands with a cold thud after the holiday season. For many, it portends the drudgery of winter until spring. By comparison, summer vacation ends in renewal in the form of new jobs, new apartments and neighborhoods, new classrooms, lingering summer romances, new arts seasons, and the return of industry as prospects and customers emerge from their summer campgrounds. You can keep the champagne and fireworks on December 31 if you like, as the hard stop after the holidays. My preference would be to anoint the third Monday of August as the official New Year’s Day. More logically, September 1.
Anyway, I welcomed the return of ConVal’s football team to the field, and I resolved to attend a home game this fall. I have no dog in the fight. My children were not raised around here, but I think sitting in bleachers along the local gridiron on a (preferably) sunny afternoon, bundled in a sweater or light jacket, is about as much a reason to live in this part of the world as any. I can sit high up in the back, with a broad view of the field and the team boosters below, watching them root for their own, which is always part of the show.
As it happens, my 50th high school reunion is this fall. It means that 50 years ago – before the parents of the ConVal football team were born, and while most of their grandparents were still walking around in short pants – my instinct for this time of year was being infused with the sight and sound of wind sprints and whistles, and senior boys wandering back to locker rooms looking larger than life in shoulder pads. At reunion weekend, alumni (it was an all-boys school at the time, not today) would swarm back to campus, pulling their station wagons up to the edge of the football field to tailgate and tell stories. Is it any wonder that the appearance of returning fall athletes affects me in the same way that the dwindling daylight hours are affecting our hummingbirds? They are thinking about heading back to Panama, or wherever they winter. We can tell. There are three of them now throughout the day, bulking up on the flowers we set out for them at the start of the season.
I wonder if the prospect of the trip fills the hummingbird with the general sort of satisfaction I get from the sight of young people arriving back on campus for practice. Soon it will be school bus drivers rehearsing routes. Cars on the highway loaded with belongings for a first year at college. Church choirs returning to sing hymns. Two lanes open on freshly paved roads. So many new beginnings.
It’s that time of year. What can I say? Ready, set, hike.
Jarvis Coffin writes fiction and essays on rural life. He is a retired media and advertising sales executive and former chef/owner, with his wife, of New Hampshire’s oldest inn, the Hancock Inn. Reach him at huntspond@icloud.com, and keep up with all his musings at jarviscoffin.com.