Dustlight

It was the dead end of summer, the dry heat so dense you could lean on it, almost. It had been that way for a while; dust rising on Union street in the glaring sun.

I was more than a little wilted by 3 PM when I started up the front steps. If not exactly dizzy, at least a little out of sorts. Perhaps it's no surprise that between the second and third step, I felt time fold over on itself.

There I was as a child, walking up the steps to the hobby store on the self-same street, and the steps of the church hall, and the door of the Hermann Son's lodge for dance class, and swinging around the railings at the old convent with Karen, and playing hopscotch downtown as if these memories lived in a place made of summer heat and I had just wandered in.

I thought "the heat is a doorway" and though it only lasted a moment, I realized it was true.

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.

Somewhere in the vicinity of 6th and Congress, or thereabouts....

The layers of peeling paint in the last photo tell an intriguing story.

Night Entrance

I've always been attracted to lights in the darkness. Perhaps I'm part moth?