Long Sentences.

I put on jeans and long sleeves this morning before I'd even let the dog out, even though it was sunny, even though it was already not the forecast we'd been forecast, which is and was so unbelievable that only a thing like putting on long sleeves after a string of what feels like ninety days of ninety degrees could conjure what we've actually got, which is: breeze. Cool weather. Actual rain on the actual radar off to our not-so-distant south and west, rain that the fancies want here by now or by a little before now, rain which is tardy but still seems to be coming all the same, rain which could dump two or three inches on our dead and dying yards and gardens over the next couple of days. And today's forecast: low seventies, though we're already there. Low seventies and rain. It's getting to where I trust the shed in the rain, but it had also gotten to where I was trusting that it wouldn't matter, that we'd never see real rain again.

I've finally got enough of the subfloor in that shed to where this afternoon I intend to shuffle the deck chairs around in there some, see if we can't get an arrangement whereby a sentence or two might be written on purpose at the desk or at the table or maybe if all else fails just right there on the vapor-barriered floor.

Late September. Long light in the back yard, sound of the wind in the droughted trees. I have of late been missing youth, been missing being young—not that I'm not plenty young now, and not that one can even set down a lament like that and be taken as anything other than some needlepointed-saying-spewing fool—but I have been, all the same. I see highschoolers on the streets and sidewalks here at home, and the college kids out at the puppet show, and the grad students back here again, all of them skinny and hopeful and trying like all hell to get some other of their tribe to look their way, and I think, thank god all that's over for me. Thank god I made it, survived, landed, impossibly, here. But then one of them will walk by with another of them, or I'll see a flock of them out on the dogwalk or through the windshield when I'm driving to or from wherever, some errand of some import, and it is not that I want to be with them, want to be taken in—instead, I want to be them, want to be them again, want another shot at it, just for a day or two. I want out of any life where I'm at all responsible for anything other than some foolhardy dream of where, later on, I might end up. But then soon enough, a mile or so on, or back up the hill, I don't want that as much, don't want it as acutely, and something about being sixteen or twenty or twenty-six just ends up being lodged in there like a little ache, like an old injury, like a soccer knee. What I want, somehow, and only barely, and only sometimes, is to go back to dreaming about getting—well, to dream about getting right about here. Which is, of course, luxury. But it is an ache all the damn same.

I'm afraid to say the rain's coming. What I will say is that the fancies say it is, and that it's on the radar. But it's late. And it's cool out there, but it's warming up. Fall is trying. It's trying to come in all at once. We'll see.