Nicole Junkerman
Reflections
Small Signs of Optimism: Nicole Junkerman's August 2026 Notebook
A season closed properly leaves less behind to carry into the next one. On finishing things, and choosing what to read next.
A season closed properly leaves less behind to carry into the next one. On finishing things, and choosing what to read next.
The end of a summer has a small ritual attached to it, and most of it involves putting things away. Nicole Junkerman has come to think that the putting away matters more than it appears to, because a season that is closed properly leaves less behind to be carried into the next one.
The physical part is straightforward and mildly satisfying. The other part, which is deciding what the summer actually amounted to, takes longer and is easier to skip. Skipping it is how a person arrives in October still vaguely intending to finish something begun in July.
Finish two or three things first
Most people carry a handful of unfinished items from summer into autumn, and most are unfinished for no better reason than that the season changed underneath them. A half read book. A note never written up. A walk repeatedly postponed until the weather made it pointless.
Clearing two or three of them now costs very little and changes the mood of September considerably. The writing page is the natural place for it, since a surprising amount of what feels unfinished turns out to be unfinished in writing rather than in fact.
A reading list chosen in the calm
Autumn reading is better when it is chosen before the autumn starts. A list assembled in a quiet week is a list made by someone with time to think. A list assembled in the second week of October is made by someone in a hurry, and it shows.
Nicole Junkerman keeps the number small, usually no more than five, on the grounds that a long list is a decision not to decide. Five titles will carry a season comfortably, and there is no rule against adding a sixth once one of them is finished. The reading room holds the current shelf.
One of the five is usually chosen to be slightly outside the usual range. That single deliberate detour tends to produce more of the year's surprising connections than the other four combined.
Packing away is also planning
There is a version of this that becomes an elaborate exercise in preparation, with systems and headings, and it does not survive. The version that survives is short: three things the autumn is for, written in plain language somewhere they will be seen again in October.
Not targets, and not resolutions, which have a January flavour and a January survival rate. Simply an honest answer to what this particular season is meant to accomplish, written while there is still enough quiet to answer it honestly. The packing notes take the same approach to rather smaller decisions.
What the summer actually gave
It is worth taking twenty minutes to write down what the summer produced, not as an inventory of activity but as a short answer to what was learned or noticed. The answer is usually shorter than expected and rarely matches what the calendar suggests should have mattered.
Nicole Junkerman has found this the most reliably useful part of the whole exercise. A season summarised in four or five lines is a season that can be built on. A season left unsummarised tends to blur into the one before it.
Leaving room for October
A common mistake is to fill the autumn completely while it is still theoretical. September always looks emptier from August than it turns out to be, and a plan that assumes the emptiness will hold does not survive its first fortnight.
The safer approach is to commit to rather less than seems reasonable and to leave the rest genuinely open. What arrives will fill it soon enough, and having space for it is what makes an autumn feel manageable rather than merely full.
One thing kept from the summer
Alongside the things put away there is usually one worth keeping in use. A habit picked up in July, a walk that turned out to be better than expected, a way of spending an hour that suited the season and would suit the autumn just as well.
Nicole Junkerman finds these easy to lose simply because they were never named. Writing down the single thing worth carrying forward takes a minute and is the difference between a habit that survives September and one that quietly does not.
The last of the light
There is still a fortnight of good light left, and it is worth spending outside rather than in preparation. The point of closing a season carefully is not to be efficient about it. It is to arrive in September without a quiet backlog of things half done.
Nicole Junkerman treats the final days of August as the last of the summer rather than the first of the autumn, which seems the right way round. The companion note on the last quiet week of August makes the case for spending them slowly.
Everything else can wait until the month turns, which it will do soon enough and without any assistance.
Explore more of the journal: Writing Desk and Reading Room, or return to the Nicole Junkerman home page.