There is no wind, yet the wicker rocker moves once forward, once backward on the deck, lightly pushed by a spirit evidently waiting—like us—for the hummingbirds to appear.
Audibly, but incoherently—as if from under a pillow—the workmen talk in between the hammer strikes. Their pick-ups are gathered, noses together, in the shallow driveway like perch. The neighbor's apartment house is suddenly the object of consecutive, daily ministrations, as if its crumbling chimneys and rotted clapboards were late-stage cancers. The old house braves its cures, with only a table-sized depression in the shingles where a chimney has recently been amputated.
The incessant whistle of the scenic train is silent until Saturday, when the kids will pile again into the old cars that move slower than bikes behind the row of houses, through the wetlands shimmering with black flies, and up into the balsam woods at the junction.
A tricky little Clementi sonata sits on my piano desk, which I work at like a jigsaw puzzle, trying to assemble a mountain or a winding road from tiny black pieces that appear tossed onto the yellowed page—just thrown there. The dog sleeps under the bench, and I can hear his sweet, sweet breaths.
He's the color of a loaf of bread that needs to stay in the oven just a little longer.
I live from day to day, now. I make no plans, have no aspirations.
I just enjoy the bumblebees of August, which I will find motionless on the stalks of aster in late September, like a photograph of summer—a memory of hot days.
