Our Summer here has been mild. I think we've endured temperatures over ninety degrees just twice. Most of our Summer days have been luscious. In fact, this has been the mildest Summer I've ever enjoyed. Even the warmer days have been soft and pleasant with breezes to tickle a smile out of anyone lucky enough to be outdoors.
The past few days have been cooler, much more like late September than the waning days of August. Oh, you won't hear any complaints from me. I love the cooler weather. I love that thirty days from right now, I'll probably have to wear a jacket everywhere I go. In sixty days, there may even be the first whispers of Winter in the air...
But I'm getting ahead of myself, and I love the season of harvest too much to rush through it.
Sunday afternoon, Daniel and I stopped at Greene's Hamburgers to pick up lunch and took it to Heritage Park to eat. We love Heritage Park because of its juxtaposition between civilization and the wilderness, because of its expansive trail network, because of the natural beauty everywhere we look no matter what the season. (We rarely visit during the Winter, but the few times we have, it's been beautiful, if a bit desolate during Nature's sleep.) After enjoying our burgers in the car with the windows down to let in the fresh air, we took a walk down to the deck built over the marsh land there.
The sunshine was bright, and the sky was that rich blue that only Autumn brings. As we made our way down the dirt and then wooden slat path, three deer erupted from the underbrush, frolicking for a moment or two, then settling down to eat, one on the sloped stretch of grass that will serve as a sledding hill when snow comes...
...the other two in the brambles at the bottom of the hill, almost totally concealed, ike this:
We watched (and photographed) the deer awhile before continuing to the benches on the deck. We sat and soaked up the scenery, the fresh air, the gentle breezes with that bare kiss of Autumn's chill. I lay back and closed my eyes, savoring the sunshine, the quiet, which was eventually interrupted by the approach of a child and his father, coming down the path as we departed.
At home, I carried a chair out to the front patio along with a book. I sat and read and listened to the bustle of a Sunday afternoon in our neighborhood. The ice cream truck, with its loud, saccharin tune annoying anyone within earshot, made its lengthy, sorrowful appeal through the streets. Its sickeningly sweet electronic song was suddenly interrupted, then momentarily obscured, by the louder, eerie wail of a passing emergency vehicle just as I was reading about the main female character of the novel losing her father.
I was struck by that moment, thinking there was some major life truth to be understood in it--irony?--but I couldn't quite wrap my mind around it, couldn't quite get my brain to form the words of my experience in that sixty seconds of one afternoon.
The siren dissipated into the distance, into someone else's nightmare in broad daylight, and the driver of the ice cream truck gave up when nobody wanted to buy an overpriced substandard dairy treat on an August day that felt a lot more like Autumn than Summer. He wheeled the truck around right in front of our house as he shut down the noise that passes for music, and headed into the waning afternoon.
I sat in my plastic chair, wearing my denim jacket, finishing my book and getting colder and colder until I went inside, and the warmth in the house felt good to me.
Copyright 2009 Melissa LaFavers