There is something about September 1 in Southern Ontario – and I’m sure in much of the northern USA and the rest of Canada – that happens every year.
It can be 78 degrees outside. The trees are still green. You can be wearing shorts and a T-shirt. The forecast might even call for another stretch of high-70s temperatures.
And yet, somehow, it feels different.
I noticed it again this year on the last afternoon of August. After spending nearly two days mostly inside working (Yeah, I got stuck working all day Sunday), I finally decided I had to get out of the house Monday afternoon because I was getting cabin fever. It was warm outside, but overcast and rainy – which seems to be almost an annual August 31/September 1 tradition around here.
It occurred to me that Mother Nature was providing a little preview: Here’s what the next several months are going to look like – she seemed to be saying – so buckle up because it’s all downhill from here.
We’re just giving you the warm version today.
Of course, there is absolutely nothing meteorologically significant about flipping a calendar page. Nature doesn’t know it’s September 1. A cold front doesn’t arrive at midnight because August has expired.
But psychologically? September 1 is enormous.
August 31 is summer. September 1 is…well, technically summer, and it will be officially for another three weeks, but we’re starting to negotiate the terms of its departure.
Suddenly you notice things you weren’t paying much attention to a few weeks earlier.
It’s getting dark earlier and the evenings are cooler. The sun isn’t as high in the sky or as intense. You may start seeing the first few leaves changing color.
NFL football is back. US Open tennis is on, the baseball playoff races are heating up, and Labor Day is approaching. Cottage weekends become something to squeeze in rather than something seemingly stretching endlessly ahead. No one comes up here for a week or two anymore. The whole town feels different. Even a beautiful warm day feels different.
We can get some spectacular September weather in Southern Ontario. Sometimes October isn’t bad either. There can be afternoons of 75 or even 85 degrees when you’re sitting outside wondering what all the fuss was about.
But those days somehow feel borrowed.
An 86-degree day in May feels like the beginning of something. There are months of summer ahead.
An 85-degree day in late September feels like somebody at the weather office made an accounting error, and we’d better enjoy it before they notice.
Maybe that’s what September really changes: our relationship with good weather.
In June, we expect it, but as the days roll on in September, we’re grateful for it.
And somewhere around this time of year, I also start thinking about vitamin D and my SAD light again. The bottles come out, my SAD lamp comes out of the box again, and I remember what happened last year when winter seemed reluctant to surrender even as the calendar moved well into spring. I also remember that I inexplicably didn’t take Vitamin D or use my lamp until January – far later than normal and far too late for the benefits to kick in fully.
It is also demoralizing to reach May and still wonder when it’s actually going to get consistently warm. That was the story of May 2026 until we hit the long weekend three weeks in. Screw you, El Niño, El Nina, or whoever was responsible for that weather anomaly.
November? Fine. We knew what we signed up for.
January? It’s Canada. Nobody is expecting patio weather. We know we will get clobbered by deep cold or gray skies – or both one right after the other.
February? Awful, but we’re grinding through it and the days are noticeably longer and brighter – though they are still cold, with probably one or more of those winter cold warnings popping up all over the place.
March? Surely we’re almost there.
April? Any day now.
May? It can be 42 degrees one day and 82 the next, then maybe 53, and then two days later it hits 80 again. Then four days of rain.
Which brings me to the question I seem to ask myself with increasing seriousness:
Why the heck do I still spend full winters here?
I don’t have livestock to tend. Nobody needs me to remain on the homestead guarding the greenhouses. I work remotely and have no office to go into any day of the week.
There are airplanes. There is Wi-Fi.
There are places where December through February do not involve scraping ice off things.
And it’s not as though I’ve been regularly escaping winter for a week or two. I haven’t gone south in winter for even a week since February 2019. COVID and life circumstances got in the way.
But maybe the next time I go, I won’t bother with a week or two. Maybe it’ll be a month. Or two, or even three.
Long enough that it isn’t really a vacation at all – just life somewhere warmer while Southern Ontario does what Southern Ontario does.
Two weeks in the sun is wonderful, but there is a cruel streak to it. You spend the first couple of days decompressing, finally get accustomed to sunshine and warmth, and then it’s time to fly home before you know it. I remember one year coming back from two weeks in Phoenix. Our flight was closing in on Toronto and the sky was crystal clear. Then I remembered that we were still above the gray clouds. Talk about deflating.
A month or two would be different. I could and would still work. I could still write. I could still have perfectly ordinary Friday afternoons when nothing particularly interesting happens. Except at the end of the workday, I could walk outside into 85 degrees instead of 14 degrees and a wind chill.
Every year I think about doing it, and every September Southern Ontario starts presenting its case for why I finally should. It begins gently. A warm but gray August 31. A slightly cooler evening and the sunset arriving noticeably earlier. Nothing alarming. Just little reminders of what’s ahead.
I’m convinced that’s why September 1 feels so different, even when the thermometer says it shouldn’t.
Summer isn’t over. There are beautiful days ahead, leaves to change, warm afternoons to enjoy, and probably at least one stretch when we’ll complain that it’s too hot.
But September 1 changes things. June says summer is coming and September says winter is coming. And every year, right about now, and especially as things have seemingly stabilized for the most part, I wonder why I keep spending the entire winter here.
More and more, I can’t come up with a particularly good answer.
johnberkovich.com 