It’s fall. It’s definitely fall. I don’t care that we’ve had the first warm stretch since 2003 and I don’t care that I had a blissful prolonged float in the pool today, it is definitely fall.
There’s something different at play here, something about how the angle of the light is softer, more diffused, creating shadows where before there were none, making stars out of objects that had been backstage all season. And there is almost always a thick slick of dew on my car in the morning, not to mention these weird long albino mosquito things hanging out on the sunroof, gossiping and having tea parties between the droplets. And there were bees at the Farmer’s Market on Saturday, which means that fall is definitely here. The bees usually show up in late September, driven crazy by fermented fallen apples andare so incensed by NBC’s new Thursday lineup that they’re ready to sting at the slightest provocation.
On Thursday, when I drove down to Milwaukee to attend my first class of the semester, there was this lovely fog rolling in off Lake Michigan, as though the breath of the Lake itself were yawning up onto the shore. The sky was an unusually deep periwinkle and the landscape was a study in frosted greys and muted stained glass, and yet the sun was coming off the clouds, shooting rays over the tops in that stereotypical Hallmark card way that usually screams for a bible verse to be printed in italics just below and to the left, ’cause look at all the God going on there, man. Just gobs of God no matter where you look.
I feel like writing something (and by ‘something’ I mean something fictional or serious or, rather, not serious (in an experiment spurred by a discussion with one Ms. Finger) instead of updating my silly little web journal. Truthfully, I have no excuse not to, other than the fact that my head is filled with pink attic insulation and my eyelids are heavy and there is a pain in between my shoulders from laying on two coats of primer and then seven applications of Ralph Lauren Hunting Coat Red (yeah, seven, mutha fucka Ralph Lauren). I even have a song that is feeding my imagination (which seems to be the trend when I get in a writing groove. When I finished the Car Salesman story, it was ‘The Air That I Breathe’ by the Hollies, repeated about 54 times. With the Baby Story, it was a duet of the Etoys song and The Cure’s ‘Pictures of You’) except I have nothing in my head to take advantage of this song, but for a few tendrils of stories and an urge to smack Sofia Coppola for making fabulous films that leave me breathless while also being such a pratt.
This morning, it is raining for the first time in what seems like months and the giant house spider that lives in my hibiscus topiary outside is dancing around raindrops like a Las Vegas showgirl. And soon, she’ll wrestle with a misguided fly and if we’re lucky, Esteban and I will be sitting in the garage, drinking iced tea and we’ll get to watch her drag it up into the eaves, like some crazy Cirque du Soleil act, and then we’ll go to Starbucks and then Home Depot (for the eighth time this weekend) and then steady ourselves to spend Labor Day tackling the damned Rose Bush.
We’re speeding toward the equinox and all you can do is strap yourself in and get ready for impact.