Spill. Autumn rumbles backstage.
I used to feel like a song I couldn’t sing. Hindsight summer showed me I could hum along the tune just fine. Hurricane season rumbles my vertebrae. Dog days of summer are sleeping in the overgrown hostas and tranquil silence has hushed my buzz. Carp breach in the twilight. Black capped chickadees call from pine boughs. Part of the song I hum are these riffs.
My teeth have mind the grind of the way summer waned, potential just crept by any day to the next. My neighborhood organism has sighed most the time, starting the season with the downing of elms. Few lilacs and dandelions made an appearance. The heat wave that came wilted and browned most of the hue and the lots of spring bunnies hid in hollow dens, nursing their kits. Now, the baby rabbits bounce out of torrential weeds like frogs, holding the neighborhood in the arms of itself.
Autumn is waiting for the curtains to open with brisk breeze then closed creaking windows. I learned once about how the seasons change, but I can’t recall why. I suppose autumn is the one I associate most with change because it is the time when a new year of school starts. Advancing a grade was a substantial number, the only one except your age. New teacher, new kids, new learning all the while summer died. Carefree days of lemonade stands and popsicle parades reminded the eventual smell of new pink erasures. Colors in the trees.
I always fell in love with some girl the first week of school and I can’t recall one year I didn’t throw up on the teachers’ desk at some point of the year. I was an awkward, small, skinny kid, full of the bliss and sorrow I could muster. Some days I pretended that the Nerf football tucked into my arm was the arm of Walter Payton winning the Super bowl and the world was the ball. Some days I was without the ball and even though I tried to let the wind blow me away, my heart was too heavy to fly.
Emotion is like air temperature, difficult to be precise. Wound tight lately with bogs. Can’t shake the cobwebs. Want to run. Check over and out. Playing tadpole before my appendages grew and my tail disappeared. Famous last words.
Get down. Shake it. Boogie.
When it rains now, all the ripe hanging tomatoes glisten with beads on their taught skin. I catch reflections of hummingbirds in my memory, but when I look close, I divert my eyes because I don’t like what I don’t see. I find pretending is better than the alternative below ground and all that jazz. The smells of this twilight season before autumn enchant. The moon hangs like an ornament in the matte sprinkled with star pepper sky.
Senses remind. The olfactory is the precise detector of memory. Somebody with a PhD did a bunch of studies. I’m enough to live in a climate where the seasons change four times a year with substantial events. Our snow and cold is our biggest hiccup of fame. That, and our enormous mosquitos the figurative size of an imaginary helicopter the size of a mosquito. Linguistics are different up here, we play “Duck, Duck Gray Duck” I guess gooses aren’t Lutheran Pious like.
Autumn spilling like a silent pre-dawn sky lingering on the abyss of a tomorrow you’re likely to have and ungrateful. Soak up the lakes before they freeze and balance on a shine that ripples in the wake of wind like ribbons tomorrow.