Sunday Early
Sunday, August 31st, 2008
Morning’s broken and fall breezes filter in through the windows pre-maturely, a day before summer’s man-made end. Each wind shift brings in a faint rotting smell from hedge apples lying in the cut grassblades from the previous weekend, all smelling as sweet as warm cider.
My granfather had a full apple tree on his land a long time ago. Every fall we’d collect the apples that had been pecked to the ground by robin’s into a bucket and he’d pitch them to us for batting practice. The smells of summer dieing takes me back to eight or 10 years old. I can’t feel the coarse bat in my hands and the tightness in my back as I swing toward a distant tree line.
The night was never cool enough for dew to set in. The windows in the cars that line the streets are dry, not sweaty, and the sidewalks are still the color of cement, not wet paper bags.
This early, the crickets chirp as though it were twilight while the world rumbles to wake – traffic on the interstate a few miles off, an airplane cracking the silence above the low-lying rooftops, and early conversation from the men who step out to the driveway for a smoke and let their old dogs have their way in the yard. This sets the other dogs to barking and soon the day is ushered in as the sun gradually climbs to a place where it can watch over part of the world.
On crisp mornings like this, children sit on couches, swaddled in blankets, watching cartoons to the sweet smells of syrup, cinnamon rolls and fruit-laden breads. Lamps left on overnight at the tops of stairwells or in long halls grow weaker as the brightness advances – as more sun trickles in the windows. Fans that were left on all night to circulate the air are switched off because the wind is too cool. House cats scratch at the door as Tom cats return home from glorious nights prowling the sewer, hiding in window wells and crossing streets lit by orange glows from streetlamps – prancing from underneath cars.
When fall and winter come, the Tom cats will finnagle their way inside, bottled up until nect spring when the sweet smell is for for arrival – for the living – not departure. Memories, if we’re not careful, can pass as easily as the seasons come and go.
