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# September was Earl's
- URL: https://www.rubyskitchentable.com/september-was-earls/
- Published: 2026-09-10T10:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-10T10:00:00.000Z
- Author: Ruby Hayes

*"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." — Psalm 23:4*

September was Earl's favorite and he never once said so.

He would not have used the word favorite. Earl did not rank things. But I knew it because of what he did in September, which was more than he did in any other month, and none of it urgent.

He cleaned the gutters in September. He did not wait for the leaves. He said if you wait for the leaves you are already behind, and he would be up that ladder the second week of September every year with his hands in the cold muck of what the summer had put up there. He checked the storm windows. He walked the fence line all the way around the back property, slow, with a fencing tool in his back pocket, looking for what the summer had loosened.

He split wood in September. Not because we needed it yet. Because the splitting is easier when the air is cool and a man can work an hour without soaking through his shirt. He would come in at dusk smelling like oak and sweat and say the stack looks about right, which meant he was pleased.

None of that was about winter. I understood that eventually. Earl was not preparing for a hard thing. Earl liked the getting-ready more than he liked the arriving. September was the month where everything he was good at had a use, and he was a man who needed his hands to have a use, and so September was when he was most himself.

This is the eighth September. The gutters get done by a young man who does half the places out this way and charges me forty dollars and is finished in twenty minutes. The storm windows have not been checked in a long time. There is still wood in the barn from the last year Earl split it and I have never been able to burn the bottom of that stack.

The psalm says the valley of the shadow. I have always noticed it does not say the valley of death. It says the shadow of it. A shadow is what a thing throws, not the thing itself. I have been walking in the shadow Earl throws for seven years and it is long and it falls across September more than any other month, and the verse does not tell me to get out of it. It tells me who is in it with me.

I am not afraid of September. I just know whose month it was.

*Lord, thou art with me. That is the whole of it and it is enough.*