un-summer

the cat sat tightly on the bed, her legs tucked up under her like a spider - she stares out the window (big yellow eyes round) and she knows.

what exactly is that smell?  hot when i went to bed, at some point i pushed off the blanket over and me and dug down under the comforter.  the morning is cold and these are the final days, everyone recovering from summer sickness.  it's a crispness, a clarity, but also a wetness that aromatically heralds autumn's approach and underscores the mornings of many oregon summer days.

it's a break from the sinking sewers, their contents dried and decomposing in the stretch of rainless days in the past few months.

how do you feel about the summer sickness?  it seems as if the rate of infection has been low, the symptoms mild this year.  john said, summer was over long ago, even as he continued to drink through the afternoon into the evening and through to the next day.  but we're all okay.

i hear some friends long for the cold wet days of oregon winter.  having grown up in alabama, i thought i had had enough of the sun - summers in the south are brutal, hot, humid, unrelenting.  but here, i think all year of the summer, long for the long hot days when we'll stay up too late and drink too much and bike about it and dance and go to the river and go camping and feel the vitamin d build up under our skin.