I remember coming up the length of Italy, from southernmost, closer to Africa, to the mountainous north, the beginning of the Alps, from full summer to advancing fall, from sullen heat to blessed coolness. On the train between Milano and Lago di Garda were people who had been in the mountains, they told us, gathering wildflowers, long spindly stalks and blue blossoms—a flower called settembre, September, they said, because that is the only time it blooms.
And rarer still, that may have been the only year it bloomed; I haven’t found any mention of it since. Could it have been a fringed gentian, maybe, as in the wonderful photo? I can’t remember the details; only the color and the name. The brief-lived flower is as elusive in my memory as it is in real time.
It represents for me, that blue settembre, something lost—like first love, a homeland, an innocence of heart. Now, here, September is hot, dry, merciless, a flaming up of all the summer’s hope before we head into the decline of fall. There is no promise and no lure in our September here; there is no charm in the journey, up and north, no escape to the mountains and the snow-fed lakes—Como, Garda, Maggiore, where love and stories start. And slip through into a new place, like the lovers in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms rowing up Lago di Maggiore from war and strife in Italy to peaceful Switzerland, though that was an elusive hope as well, as it happened.
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