September moon

It’s a smooth and early evening on Labour Day. Crows are sleepless under forest cover as the stillness of the Glenwood valley meets the night. From MacaulayMountain I watch as the moon rises in the east; the sun sets to the west. The rooftops, sidewalks and steeples of the Shire town peek from below the trees. Over there, boats wait in deep purple hues of the harbour while beyond, a tangle of ochre dust lifts from the loose fields of Sophiasburgh; beyond that again, the cool rise of back-country granite lies in shadow.

On the calendar, the equinox of autumn nears, the Full Corn Moon of the historic Algonquin people announcing wild rice and pumpkin, beans and squash to be ready. It’s the moon of return-to-school, football and, according to fashion, the endof- season for wearing seersucker whites. It’s also a time of brisk sales for storekeepers; the moon of rejoining schoolmates, of new crayons and socks. Of picnic baskets and photos gathered; a shifting time of renewal, of past, of leaving and of coming home.

Labour Day stems from a working class struggle. At the end of the industrial era, mechanization, the rise of cities and expanding populations meant an oversupply of skilled workers who could be individually let go for little cause; Karl Marx was speaking out for Communism, Jesse James robbing banks, Louis Riel was in exile in the U.S. and there were patents filed by the minute: Patents for donut cutters, hydraulic elevators, paper bag and toothpick-making machines and even the gas engine. At Amherstburgh, Ontario, Elijah McCoy invented the first of his many oiling gizmos used on trains and factory engines, his designs readily becoming known as the ‘real McCoy’.

Meanwhile, the machine, coupled to a huge labour force, took down the value of learned craft and hand-skills, took down the wages until workers rose to claim their rights, rose in solidarity for the nine-hour day demanded by the Toronto printers who went on strike against George Brown’s Globe newspaper. Supporters flooded Queen’s Park in Toronto, where the leaders of the strike were arrested. Ten thousand men and women stood firm demanding that unions, be sanctioned by law. And the right-honourable lawyer from our Shire town, by then sitting in Ottawa, saw gold in the politics of the underdog and said yes; Sir John A. said yes to unions and a day to celebrate the working person. Labour Day was declared in 1872. Sir John gained re-election as prime minister that same year as Ulysses S. Grant regained the presidency of the U.S., with the support of the women’s suffrage movement.
But the time nearing autumn equinox is much more than a turn of calendar and a page in history. Seems like there is a shift of mood that can be counted on under the September moon; maybe it’s the scent of the earth that holds that certain summer- end melancholy.

As a boy, Labour Day was the weekend when the cottage swimming dock was hauled onto shore, a ritual I protested as being out-of-step with what is still my favourite time of year. A time of cool nights and warm, mosquito-less days; a turning point of summer passing, summer love and freedom; of heavy dew, butterflies, cicadas and crickets calling. My struggle was to let go of those moments.

You see, I was one who had little use for the binding regime of the school year. For me, it was like sitting on a bus bench, shoulder to shoulder with others for some never-ending uninspired ride through a desert. Uninspired, that is, until music entered my life along with a newfound expression in the arts. These became my wings to carry me like a grasshopper out of the deep grass and onto the open plains. I think about that tonight. Now, as I stand here and the leaves of the Manitoba maple fall by my feet. I think about the staleness of the air, the antiseptic smell of school hallways and drone of the classroom and thank the cosmos for giving me the stars of the heavens, the muddrenched creeks, for song and drawing pencils that preserved my soul in the trek through the parched desert of the classroom.

And so now in this moment, with the sun and the moon together in the same sky that shelters the treetops of this island, I am blessed by the wonders that a simple view like this can offer a stranger passing through in the night.