Meditative Prose

Friday, 21 August 2009

After a week of intense heat (for Vermont), the weather has finally turned. Through the window behind me I can hear perhaps the second best sleeping music nature provides: a chorus of crickets accented by the occasional breeze stirring the leaves. Bed is calling me, but I feel compelled (after three and a half months) to check in with whoever still reads this website.

For a few weeks now, I’ve been noticing evidence of the changing seasons. This happens every year: mostly it still feels like summer, and people are acting like it’s summer, but every once in a while, something — often a smell, but sometimes a chill in the air, or just a hunch — reminds me that fall is just around the corner. This year the first sign was when we were walking into town on a cool day and the sidewalk in front of us was littered with crab-apples. Some of them had been crushed under foot, and the rotten-sweet smell made me suddenly aware that summer was almost over. Soon, apple picking & cider donuts. Hay-rides. Pumpkins.

Another day as I was walking to work, something made me think back to the first day of school each year, which was always surreal. I had to get up earlier than I had been all summer, put on my first-day-of-school outfit, have mom take my picture with my brothers on the steps, and then wait at the bottom of the driveway for the bus. I would usually kill time by throwing rocks at the metal box attached to the power lines across the road, secretly hoping a direct hit would cause it to explode in a shower of sparks. There wasn’t much traffic on our road that early on a weekday morning, and I could always hear the rumble of the bus’s diesel engine before I saw it. I remember the first sight of it, cutting through the fog as it rounded the bend, lights blinking and stop-sign extended. But mostly I remember taking that first step inside the bus, greeting the driver (for many years, it was Annie) and the smell of the big vinyl-covered seats washing over me. The smell of schoolbus seats! One whiff still conjures scores of memories for me.

Summer is almost gone, but who can complain? Every day on my walk to work, I pass an amazing garden with a silver-leaved tree (Eucalyptus?), a large holly bush, and an old blooming hibiscus with flowers as big as my fist (a friend tells me it’s called a “Rose of Sharon”). On my walk home, I run my hands over the fuzzy flowers of a lavender bush and take a big whiff, instantly putting me out of work mode. Life is good.

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