Winding Down

The tomato plants are turning yellow. We’ve reached mid September and the sun no longer climbs over the trees to warm the patio. Tiny orbs of fruit still ripen, but the vines slouch and hang with withered leaves. As I pluck the flesh from weary stems, squirrels stuff acorns into bulging faces in the yard behind me. The cicadas’ dentist-drill shrieks have faded to keening whispers. Holding a harvest of cherry tomatoes in the hem of my shirt, it occurs to me that I’ve been busy for the last few weeks and almost forgot to notice that we are in transition.

A month ago, the mid-afternoon sun poured over the top of the house and streamed into the back windows, producing sweat on my upper lip. Most times, the thermometer out back recorded temps over 90. Today I park myself at the computer in blue jeans and a sweatshirt. The house sits chilly in the shade, and when I walk outside to pick the tomatoes, I take a startled breath at air that feels warm.

For a moment, I sit on the back steps in the one sunny spot filtering through the shadows cast by waving oak leaves. In a few weeks, we’ll be stacking wood. The sun will set earlier.  We’ll light a fire, simmer soup on the stove, bake something apple in the oven. Trees will bleed the reds and oranges hard frosts cut into them; flannel shirts will brush soft against our skin.

There is so much to look forward to about autumn. But for the next few days, I’m going to focus on now—how the sedum blushes pink in the top garden while Black-eyed Susans brighten the ledge below, and especially, on a lingering shawl of warmth that wraps itself around my shoulders as the departing fingers of summer lift on a freshening breeze.

Pause

I’m not sure if today is perfect because we anticipate what is soon to come, or if today, contained within itself is, well, perfect.

This morning, fall whispered its notice in red leaves that scattered on the ground where we walked; acorns announce it at home as they ricochet from the oak, off aluminum gutters, down to the patio below. The cicadas rev their engines in the heat though the crickets’ mute their beat, as if in subduing themselves they’ll avoid the attention of the frost hovering in the distance. The sun burns but the angle is low—for short hours it warms over the pines, then too early, drops behind. In the garden purple spikes of Liatris age brown; industrious bees have moved on to red Sedum, bobbing at the top of the ledge.

As we get closer to the change of seasons, it is all one can do to perch like a cat in a patch of sun, listening as the breeze inhales in the woods, to draw a breath at the transparent wings of a dragon fly that rests on a jean clad knee, and push back a chair to catch the last of the afternoon sun.