There is a specific version of Boston that only really exists in September.
Suitcases appear on Green Line platforms. Parents double park outside apartment buildings. Moving trucks take over Allston and Fenway. Someone is carrying a mattress down Comm Ave while someone else is trying to figure out which direction the train goes.
And if you just arrived here, thousands of people around you are doing almost exactly the same thing.
Boston has 36 colleges and universities and more than 150,000 students, according to the city.
Every late August and early September, tens of thousands of students return to Boston or arrive for the first time.
The city literally reorganizes around it.
This year, Boston issued more than 2,500 moving truck permits for Aug. 29 through Sept. 1 alone, while temporary parking restrictions stretched across student-heavy neighborhoods including Allston, Fenway, Mission Hill and Roxbury.
September 1 has become such a Boston ritual that the piles of discarded furniture and curbside scavenging have their own nickname: Allston Christmas.
Most Boston leases turn over around the beginning of September, concentrating an enormous amount of moving activity into the same few days.
It feels closer to a citywide event than a normal change of apartment.
But the interesting part happens after the trucks leave.
A city that felt unfamiliar on arrival slowly fills with people also learning it for the first time.
Someone else is figuring out the T.
Someone else walked into the wrong classroom this morning.
Someone else is eating alone in a dining hall before meeting the people who might become their closest friends here.
By October, most of that starts looking normal.
The routes become familiar. The coffee shop gets a usual order. The neighborhood starts feeling smaller.
September is the month Boston gets thousands of new versions of itself at the same time.
So if the city still feels a little strange right now, you are surrounded by people building their version of Boston too.
