There's a Welsh word, hiraeth. No clean English version of it exists. The closest anyone gets is homesickness, but that's not quite it either. It's closer to missing a home, or a time, that might not have been exactly the way you remember it, and that you can't get back to anyway. You don't need the word to know the feeling. Most people already have it filed somewhere, tucked into a smell, a song, a kitchen that doesn't exist anymore, a person's voice.
That's what September tends to stir up. Not grief really. More like a drawer you don't open often, but when you do, everything in it is still exactly where you left it.
If a person, a place, or a year keeps surfacing for you this month, that's worth sitting with rather than brushing off. It's not you dwelling. It's you still keeping the account, still checking in on something that mattered.
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