A Quiet Autumn Night
It is so quiet, I hear the second-hand on the kitchen clock ticking. There goes an airplane overhead, somewhere up there in the sky, a hundred people belted in, dozing, reading, shifting, catapulting through the night. It is 54'. It is autumn. This is always the season for me: the one where I seek out the still places in the day, listen for the silence. What I really want is to pull out my old sleeping bag, lay it down upon a hill, and climb in, stare up, watch how minutely and inevitably everything changes. I don't want to miss it. I know that I will. Suddenly all the leaves are on the ground. Tonight, just before dinner, I slipped on a fleece and some gloves and dug little holes around the garden. Yesterday a friend's mother snapped off the tops of a flowering sedum, gave them to me, and said, "Plant them, like this, upside down." So I did, tucking those starbursts of purple into bed the way I do my child: tenderly, patting tight the blanket, hopeful for...