It always seems like summer is over when September arrives. It’s the beginning of the ber’s. SeptemBER, OctoBER, NovemBER, with BERRRRRRRRR continuing for way too many months. Nights are cool and we’ve already had a risk of frost! I’m a spring person really. Summer can be too humid for me so when everything is getting green in the spring it give me hope for whats to come.

What I truly hate about September in Fredericton are all the university students that take over the city. They arrive in the sports cars their parents gave them for graduation, minus a muffler but with a stereo system you can hear miles before they pass our house. They speed and drive like idiots. A couple of years ago, there was a “party house” just up the street full of students who all seemed to own motorcycles. They’d come speeding up the street at all hours of the night. Our neighbourhood is infamous for bad drivers *(well the whole city is actually) who roll through stop signs. I’m surprised that one of the bikers didn’t hit one of these cars that always pull out in front of you. I phoned the city police to complain at least 2 or 3 times and were told they had received several complaints from the neighbours, but they ever seemed to do much. Sitting in the area at 12:30 am on a Sunday morning with a Radar gun would have guaranteed them a big ticket and maybe if one of the students got one, the rest would take heed and slow down.

Every Saturday night or Sunday early morning, you can hear a bunch of them coming home drunk from the bars trying to act like big men as they upset the postal boxes across the street.  or throwing their beer bottles at our rock wall. We even found a stolen bike in our front yard a few years back. A student stole it to get home and dumped it here. I phoned the police and they picked it up. A few hours later, I received a phone call from a very happy kid thanking me for finding her bike.

These students rent apartments in our city and when they leave, dump their old lazy boy chairs and couches at the curb expecting the garbage truck to take them away. They forget they are visitors in our city.  I’m sure they wouldn’t act as bad as they do here in their own communities, but maybe I’m wrong about that one.

The students bring much needed cash to the city when 8 to 10,000 of them arrive every fall, but for many, its their first time away from home and their parents and they take their freedom a little to far drinking and acting like idiots. The city police need to lay down the law and not let them get away with so much.

So September isn’t my favorite time for this reason. There! I’ve been wanting to get this off my chest for a long time.