I looked out of our front window early this morning. Three things –
first — the small neighbor girls, who are so curiously enchanted by everything about us — who, using their hands to shade their eyes spied, giggling, through the glass of our front door, stealing a glimpse into the secluded magic that must be our house (why are neighbors’ houses always more full of mystery and wonder than our own?) – they created panels of art on our sidewalk with chalk – rainbows and flowers strewn for blocks of cement – a gift for us alone – signed in childish hand — Kiley, Abbey, and Lily. The girls announced last evening that Lily loves us and is going to live with us. She demands my presence when she is outside playing in the evenings. “Doesn’t she look exactly just like a witch…” she muttered under her breath one day to her little bespectacled friend. I catch her – out of the side of my eye – staring at me and making faces – trying to contain me in her mind…
second — the Flatirons were far and aloof in dim, yellow light filtered through morning. Not intimate, as they sometimes are, with crowns of mist – revealing, through darkness and light their folds and canyons – distances unwrapped by where the light settles. On these mornings you need only reach out a hand to touch the place where they rise from the flatland. This morning they were featureless, dark and flat. They did not beckon.
the third thing — was a strange yellow smudge in the sky that drifted like smoke instead of cloud. It made me wonder if something burned. I watched for a few minutes sipping my coffee, as it spread and morphed, dropping lower toward the ground. It took some time before I remembered that is how fog looks from a distance. With such dry days, it has been awhile since fog has risen in the morning.
It is August now, the month when the light shift becomes noticeable to me; when Autumn lurks in the peripheral vision — just in the corner of the eye. The light turns warmer, drops lower – the shadows grow longer. I’m a spud sort, a root vegetable — have always been really. I crave light – but I thrive in cool darkness. I always experience a secret sense of relief as the circle moves toward shorter days with cooler nights. Soon I’ll be nested under down in a cold room – inhaling the warmed scent of my lover’s sleeping skin.