The Melting World

I switched the furnace on yesterday morning, though by midday we were in T-shirts. That was me running and my son kicking his scooter down the greenway that stretches for miles alongside a cemetery called Sunset. We were flying, suspended, hovering, above the pine tree tops, between summer and fall.

You could say it like this: Old friends, nostalgia, ennui, and wabi-sabi, settled down at the low table for some green tea and the geese gathered themselves outside.

The sky-blue swimming pool in the park down the street was emptied of its chlorinated water last week, right before school started. It’s a stern message to children that the carefree splashing is over. Chaotic shouting is no longer acceptable behavior. The pool has begun to hoard its detritus of broken sticks and slate colored leaves for the coming freeze.

My son and I rush through the dead center of the stillborn pause, life and death holding hands, we can’t slow down just yet.

We took a trip to the downtown library to watch the glass elevators move up and down, their gears and pulleys exposed like whale intestines. My son leapt back and forth, sometimes his feet left the earth completely, as he celebrated noisily over and over the end, the middle, and the beginning of the behemoth machines’ migrations.

I stood at a table of display books nearby, reading Eleanor Roosevelt, who insisted that if I faced my fears head on they would lose their power, and I would have the courage to go on to the next fear.

If I did what I was born to do, she added, all the confusion and sleeplessness would fall off my limbs: I could be reborn, too, and leap toward what moves me, take flight, sing, even at that beginning of the end of things.