September is my favorite month, and it’s not just because the air has a fresh crispness to it or that the leaves turn vivid shades of yellow, red and orange. September is my favorite month simply because great things have happened to me in September.

I helped bring my niece into the world in September. I remember declaring that I would become a journalist on a warm September day after only a few weeks into my high school mentorship with the local newspaper. My husband proposed to me in September. And we married a year and two weeks later, again in September.

But it was almost the wedding that wasn’t, thanks to my least favorite month — March.

March is such a depressing month. It’s neither winter nor fall, which means it’s too warm for snow — and hence too warm to go sledding — yet still too cold to do anything else outside. The entire month is usually day after overcast day, mixed with March rain, which in my opinion, is the dreariest rain of all.

But March 2010 started out better than most. I was engrossed in learning a new skill at my copy-editing job with The Daily Press. I had nailed down a lot of details about the wedding, including setting the date for the third weekend in September. And then March became March again when The Daily Press announced layoffs. The cuts included most of the copy-editing staff, me included.

When I got home from signing the required layoff paperwork, I assessed our situation.

With only one paycheck and a dwindling emergency savings account between us, my then-fiancé and I soon wouldn’t be able to afford daily necessities, such as food or rent.

But more important, without a job, I wouldn’t be able to pay the down payment for a wedding venue or pay off my wedding dress or even buy my husband a ring.

It was a sobering thought.

In the month or so that I was out of work, we daily discussed putting off the wedding, if only until we could actually afford to have one. And every day we decided to give my job search one more day before we did anything drastic.

And as I wrote in my first column, published just a day before my wedding, hope came from a town I knew next to nothing about, and it came on the day I had decided I would officially push the wedding off for an indeterminate amount of time.

Thanks to strong support from the community, Suffolk’s local paper had found itself needing a new page designer, and I definitely needed a new job.

Since I accepted my position with the Suffolk News-Herald I’ve spent many hours enjoying the things the city has to offer. My husband even jokes that I’ve spent more of our marriage in Suffolk than I have with him, thanks to our opposite work schedules.

But I always reply that if not for Suffolk, we could still be unmarried, waiting for the day when we could actually afford a wedding.

So every September, when it’s time to celebrate our wedding day, I also celebrate Suffolk, which played a part in making it possible for me to marry my best friend.