Unseasonable

Hour after hour the clouds form and advance, beginning as small, indeterminate puffs in the south, expanding as they move northward, at last piling above the mountains in great, billowing masses. There is no hint of the recent fires. The air by evening carries instead an oceanic damp, and the sun sets amid a faint, gathering gray mist. The season has changed utterly, but is neither summer nor fall. Some alien season has arrived, as though the mountains had become an island somewhere, lying along a cool, eddying current that brings each day the same drift of an ancient time. I half expect to hear sirens sing from the incongruous pine woods. Let it drift, then, if that's what it will. I have nowhere to go. Somewhere else might as well come to me.