Vista 6

A miraculously warm day. It’s like summer, I think, sitting barefoot in the grass. I tickle my toes against the clover, the crabgrass. It’s still green, though it feels cold and a little wilted. It’s not the crisp carpet it was a month ago during the strong September heat. But just a couple days ago they said it would snow, and I feel like I’m getting a treat. I’m staying up past bedtime, being rewarded a second dessert. Nature is in retrograde, protesting the dying season, allowing us an extra burst of life. The sky is powder blue, without one cloud to spoil it. There are bugs again, tiny little fruit flies. Were they just born? Even those who you’d think wouldn’t be fooled – the little insects – think it’s spring. I don’t have the heart to tell them that in a couple days the ground will freeze and they’ll be gone. But for now, they can crawl on my legs, for that’s what they’re doing.
Even the crickets are back, vibrating away in the bowing reeds of wheat.
I’ve been feeling it too – the retrograde. Some of it has to do with the changing season. Like a little girl, I feel the urge to suddenly jump on the crunchy leaves I pass on my way to school. I don’t stop myself. At Whole Foods they had free samples of hot apple cider, and smelling the spicy cinnamon, I immediately wanted some, but though I should first ask my mother’s permission. At Hay Day, a market in our town, the cider was always scalding hot.
Mostly I’ve been thinking a lot about my brother. For years, I’ve held certain opinions of him – ones that may be based on things he did in his adolescence – things I’m too stubborn to forgive – and suddenly I’m writing all about my childhood for my classes. I’m remembering him as my little brother, my friend, my companion. As I’m writing with nostalgia about my experiences in nature from my youth, I’m realizing that he was there with me the whole time. Now, more than I’m homesick or missing the ocean or my childhood, I’ve realized that I miss the closeness we had when we played together in the woods near my house. And I feel to blame that we don’t have it anymore.
I can thank this program for helping me recognize these emotions. I’m churning up memories that have been settled at the bottom of my mind for a long time. I hadn’t thought about running through the woods with Jon and picking raspberries for so many years. Writing is serving as a sort of therapy – an uncovering.
The past weeks of autumn have been gray. It has rained drearily almost every day. Today the sun shines so brightly, and for the first time this fall, I can see how vibrant and intensely beautiful the leaves are. They were surely as vividly yellow and green and orange yesterday and the day before, but now I can really see them.