The Edge Of Autumn

Just days before the equinox and blazing hot. Autumn merely a celestial notion.

I'd been expecting a package and news had reached my ears that it had been delivered that very afternoon. Fantastic. With hope in my heart, I walked down the road. 

It was the same walk I'd dreamed of once long ago, and though now I was wide awake in the sun, a subtle hallucinatory quality had  nevertheless begun to steal across the land. 

Most of the time, it's not so obvious that this place is on the edge of the desert. In the brutal last days summer, though, with no soft greenery to cushion it. a barren moonscape reveals itself. Layers of memory (it seemed to me) had become exposed like rocks jutting above the surface, the bleached and jagged bones of the earth. 

I remembered my father, my siblings and the neighbors we'd had, and the games we'd played, among the limestone outcroppings that had their own names and the dry creeks and river bed. The agave, a huge, old towering thing, reached its spiky leaves to the sky. The needly hooked tooth edges snagged my attention, the way things do when the world goes strange.

Yes, the landscape was feeling restive, and really, who could blame it? It had been a relentless season

I was halfway down the road and the wind was picking up. Shades of the old dream again, but this time the wind was scorching, hot enough to distort the air. It rattled and hissed and shook the trees. Soon, like the dream, it began to howl. 

No sooner had I reached the place where the two roads met than I felt it, that mysterious, indescribable sense of another reality overlapping my own. I stood there for a while, half-hypnotized by the spinning vents on top of old Mrs. Kirtchner's house, wondering what it was that I felt, and how to even talk about it. But all I could articulate to myself was that I was standing at the edge of Autumn.

Well, hang around a crossroad long enough and you are bound to discover something.

My package was in the mailbox. What was in it? Eh, just stuff. A red herring, as red as my dress in the equinoctial wind.

I walked back home, once again full of knowledge that was beyond me to explain

The Doorway to Autumn

Last Monday, as I was standing on the corner waiting for the harvest moon to rise, an otherworldly feeling began to settle over our street. You know the kind of thing. A sense of whispers just out of the range of hearing, the feeling that a door has opened somewhere.

Ah, I thought, the spirit of Autumn moves across the land.

Before long, my spouse drove past on his way to an errand. He rolled down his window and asked - looking very puzzled - if here had been a dog with me just a moment before. I said "no, why do you ask?" He said, "because I could have sworn I saw Bambi standing right next to you."

Bambi, our dog who passed away in August.

I like to think she had come through the doorway to Autumn and stayed with me to watch the moonrise.

The Summer Of Ill Luck

The season is coming to an end, and while I try to count my blessings, there's no denying it's been a summer of ill luck. One of those times when things are just wrong.

It started in the spring, really, or maybe even in winter, but it was the summer when this oppressive atmosphere - a sort of emotional miasma, you might call it - reached its fullness and refused to budge. Perhaps it began as early as last year, when the hurricanes hit and so many were left to suffer. In a way, it's felt like hurricane weather ever since.

Whatever the reason, I can sense the stirrings of desperation beneath the roiling uncertainty. The hippies have a term for it - bad vibes.

Which isn't to say there was no beauty, or nothing good. Even hard times offer their moments of softness, if you look closely enough.

Here are a few pictures to (hopefully) prove my point.

There is a quote from Yoko Ono  - "The sky is always there for me, while my life  has been going through many, many changes.When I look up at the sky, it gives me a nice feeling, like looking at an old friend."

This is how I'm trying to think of things. No matter what happens, the sky - one way or another - will always be with us.

In the meantime, we await a happier season.