September in Minnesota is the month the morning glories really start to come into their own, at least in the relatively temperate regions around the Twin Cities.
Here, the soil anywhere near the Mississippi is a primal, rich black, so fertile that a discarded apple core is a sapling by the following summer. Blocks from the river the soil of former river bottoms and flood plains, now thrust a hundred yards onto the top of a plateau, are an incredibly satisfying mix to get your hands into. Whatever you plant here grows unless some little creature beats you to it.
I don't remember exactly when I fell in love with the morning glories that come into their glory in September. I just wish I had discovered them earlier.
It was a gradual thing; they crept on me, which is pretty much the way they operate.
First, it was the abused ivy plant at my first house. The previous owners had tried to kill it and cut it back, but I was entranced by the idea of a vine-covered front porch. Let loose in one year it had engulfed the entire porch, covering it with a lacework of delicate tendrils and heart-shaped leaves. It gave shade during the hottest months and provided a framework for gazing at the night sky; sparrows and chickadees perched and argued on its vines. The only thing lacking was some kind of blossum.
A friend offered some monster morning glories one spring--- a version with thick vines and a tendency to climb twenty or more feet if you let them. They were so deep a purple as to be nearly black, but their centers shaded from black to blood red to lavender to palest pink in their centers.
They climbed. Oh, boy, did they climb. At one point I pulled down a bough from my maple tree, tied a string to it, and let the branch bounce back up to its regular spot. Sure enough, the morning glories climbed twenty feet into the maple and started up the branch before frost and fall put a stop to their campaign.
Some time later I bought more varieties----red, white, blue----and sewed those in amongst my own. That year the morning glories covered the fences in a mass of spirals and blossums that ranged from quarter- to saucer-sized. Every morning they faced the sun and bloomed, never in the same place or number; every afternoon, they withered and fell, only to provide me with another show the next morning. Some days there were thirty or more blossums hidden in the tangles of leaves and vines and other flowers on the fence. Hunting for them---and documenting every morning's formation of blossums----was a game in itself.
They aren't flowers you can really pick and make a bouquet out of. After the first couple of years, my adopted nieces and I made a game out of searching out the dried-out seed pods amongst the withered vines and leaves, when I was up to it. Even when it was the girls doing the planting for me, when I could not so much as step outside the door, the flowers came, within reach of a camera lens, their changeability every day a small and welcome surprise every day.
After September 11th, my morning glories--by then, all the result of those seeds harvested the previous fall ----suddenly changed. I had started out with maybe four colors---black purple, red, white, and blue---and suddenly I had more colors than I could count. They were lavender, pink, palest blue, deep red, white with rose stripes, blue with pink stripes, tiny flowers, huge saucers, white with two or three different-colored stripes----and too many variations in between to successfully count. Every morning it was a new surprise, a profusion of color amidst that thicket of vines.
I went off to war, and no one planted them for me, and their seeds fell to the ground with the snow and the cycle of seasons. I came home, and gradually the fences where I once planted them seemed to get further and further away. And yet, the morning glories still came. They weren't as numerous as before----no one had helped them, after all---but still they came, their leaves seemingly bigger than ever, their colors always changing, the delicate spiral vines still reaching out in that inexplicably fascinating way to fence wire or post or string. I was too heart sick too often in those years to either plant or tend them, too often hospitalized, too often crossing from not wanting to live to wanting to die, but the morning glories were the one thing that could draw me to a window, or sometimes, to sit on the front step, where they grew up porch rail and trellis.
I have a jar full of morning glory seeds, waiting to be planted in the spring, waiting for another bright September month, when the air begins to carry with it the scent of leaves turning, the soil drying out, another year past that other September morning. Fall used to be a season of rest and work, rest and work, when the old mournful dried-out vines had to be pulled down, when the seeds were put away for the first warm rainy day of spring, when the leaves were raked and dumped on the compost heap, which itself had to be rotated, then heaped on the beds for next year. September was the perfect month, not too cold, not too warm, the end of one season, the start of another. Then one day and one small group of men changed all that.
We had, for a very brief window, a changed nation that could have been something better had we been lead differently. Despite our differences, I think we all long for something we had so briefly in the days after September 11th; that sense of shared purpose and connection.
Instead, small towns mourn young men and women, and we have spilled more blood than any terrorist ever did. What happened to the nation that once grew victory gardens, held scrap drives, gave up nylons and chocolate, and even before then, saw the good in finding jobs for the hopeless, help for the needy, and courage to the fearful?
We were attacked; we attacked one nation that sheltered those attackers---and another nation that had done nothing. We've submitted to fear rather than fight it, and over the passing of a decade have given up liberties for no security at all.
And yet that bright warm day, a small group of people, faced with their own deaths, decided that they would not be the instruments of others' deaths, and without weapons, training, or anything but a sense of right and wrong they decided to make sure that others would live. They were not soldiers. They were just ordinary Americans, probably terrified, and yet demonstrating that bravery is the product of fear.
In the ruins of the World Trade Center, the remains of a young police cadet were found, his EMT bag beside him in the dust. Mohammed Salman Hamdani had seen the disaster unfold and had raced to it to aid the victims. Instead he became a double casualty; first he was killed by the collapse of the buildings, then he was labeled a potential terrorist, based on nothing but his name, his religion, and his nation of birth.
Usman Farman was another Pakistani-American fleeing the cascading debris when he tripped and fell in the debris and the dust. Out of the dust emerged the sight of a Hasidic man, his black hat, coat, and pants grey with dust. Farman had an Arabic prayer for safety on a pendant around his neck, and the Hasidic man held the pendant in his hand and read it out loud. Then he said, "Brother, I don't know about you, but there's a huge cloud of glass headed this way, let's get the hell out of here." The Jewish man pulled the Arab man to his feet and they fled the maelstrom. In the confusion, they separated, but for Farman, the memory remains a beacon, and even though he speaks about Islamophobia he keeps that memory in his heart. "The last person I would have expected."
As the tenth anniversary approaches, there are few better messages than those of Flight 93, Salman Hamdani, Usman Farman and the Hasidic man who saved him, and others of their caliber. We can start over again.
It's not my place to suggest anything to anyone who's lost someone. But for the rest of us, there are worst things to hope for than leaving the anger and the fear behind, and embracing, perhaps, the recognition that there can be no courage without fear, and no September, I hope, without morning glories.