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