Last night for the first time since spring
I wore long pants and a swear shirt when I walked. The change of seasons has announced itself with distinct crispness. It rained yesterday, heavily, for a couple of hours. As it started, the sky grew dark as night. People who saw how suddenly and deeply it darkened were astonished. As dark as an eclipse, wet as a monsoon.
This morning is grey and dry by comparison, only a little moisture on the windshield. A blue sky with a slight haze in it. A bite in the air we haven't felt in a while, although it did not frost here. Moisture glistens on the lawns.
Downtown, a car approaches from the other direction: a woman's face is marked by her essential sadness. We make ourselves. If we wish, we can remake ourselves. Can't we?
Just north of town, harvest of the first field of soybeans on the east side of the road has started. There are so many fields with black dirt turned up. You can see that we are well into autumn, so much harvesting done, so much tilling. Give us this day our daily bread. This year in such seeming abundance.
Last evening the seagulls were a massive, swirling, tilting cloud - huge and various like a storm. This morning there is no sign of them.
Cloud. Could. Cold U. Clod U. Loud C. Cloud.
In Ripon, youngsters on their way to school race their bicycles heedlessly across busy streets. They have a sureness about them; a cocky kind of confidence. They haven't learned yet that certainty is death, that death is the only certainty.
Those last 2 sentences there - if i didn't know they'd been written in 1998, i'd swear it was a coded reference to President Bush!
Posted by: dave | October 01, 2004 at 08:15 PM
Yes, the passage was written in 1998. One might profitably steal the description and attach it to Bush, if he has the time and energy, because I agree it would fit. Watch for my George Bush send-up tomorrow morning (Sunday 10-3), to see if I get closer.
Posted by: Tom Montag | October 02, 2004 at 05:49 PM