Summer Still

The afternoon gives strong hints of being perfect, though I'm too muddled to be able to tell. There was a small second crop of jasmine blossoms this year, and a small second crop of golden poppies. The cat spends the warm afternoons in the back yard, napping in one shady spot or another. Sometimes I go out and sit on the porch and watch her, and look at the shapes of the fully-leafed trees and the patch of sky to the south below that lately vacated by the sun. There are softer spots about than my back yard, I'm sure, but I have no way of finding them and would have no way of reaching them. Nothing has ever been quite what I've imagined it could be. I sit until the hard chair begins to make my bones ache, then walk about stirring a bit of dust from the desiccated lawn before going in. Something outside the shrunken world hovers at the edge of my dazed thoughts. The cat just naps and doesn't care.

Transit

As a child I often felt a sense of melancholy arrive with dusk. It might creep up as I walked homeward or as I dealt with some task in the yard, or it might suddenly sweep over me in mid-game if I were with a group. As an adult, I've reverted to this pattern most often when I've been ill or out of sorts. I've come to associate illness with childhood. Maybe illness is like childhood in that one's power is reduced and dependence increased. I just watched the sky turn dark and the rural world vanish, and even now that full night has arrived some sense of sadness lingers. I watch the few stars and listen to the summer insects buzz, and hear the dog next door snuffle along the fence on the trail of some nocturnal visitor. The night is pleasant, but tinged with the memory of that hour of decline, that slow fade which was like the essence of loss.