On the edge of the weeds the bass are biting. They can feel that summer is retreating; they sense their long wait is coming again. They’re hungry and when we hook into them they fight. Through the tannin stained water their backs flash with bronze reflections against the afternoon sun.
In a square of the same sunlight at home my dog lays half on the couch and half on an antique bench with rounded sides that was once an Ely High School shop project. This one was in our house when we bought it. It is still natural stained wood with white splatter marks. It was in our mudroom when we arrived and it is the perfect height for setting a coffee cup on or a dinner plate when you’re eating in the living room or sitting on when you pull on your boots or take them off. We’ve now got four of them because I keep finding them in people’s homes when I go to buy antiques or at estate sales or other random times. Two are natural wood, one is gray and blue and one is red. They are sturdy and made to last.
Outside in another patch of sunshine, under our current bushes and amidst my nemesis itchweed lays our Minnow. Her tabbiness is a beautiful blend of brown and gray and black with flecks of gold. Her eyes are somehow green and gold at the same time. I cannot imagine life without her.
Across the yard the strangest Jack-in-the-beanstalkesque sunflower has risen to a height above the height of our back porch steps. It would be four feet taller, but instead of rising straight up, it grew out, around and changed directions again and then up, like a strange spiral staircase. Just on its own.
Now out of the top where normally one or two large flower heads would be, there are five or six or more (because each day or so there are new small flowers appearing) sunflower heads on miniature stalks. The bees, just as they did last autumn, are constantly hovering around these and the hummingbirds and butterflies regularly visit them as well.
The sky above is cornflower blue dotted with white marshmallow fluff and the mountain ash berries hanging from the tree in my neighbor’s yard are bright orange and heavy on the green branches.
Each minute or so a small yellow and brown leaf falls to my feet from the crabapple tree that I’m sitting under. The tuxedo cat is pawing at the watering tin before he drinks from it. He’s listening intently for sounds of field mice or shrews in the undergrowth around our garage. Each of the past four evenings he has left me a mouse that he has dispatched at the foot of my steps. He’s a good mouser.
A day or two later I trim the grass. I mow. I weed around the rock border of the flower and vegetable beds. I sit back down and enjoy the way everything folds in around me and then I begin to write a little on my novel. After a while I listen to a Longmire novel on Audible and fall asleep in the sun with the smell of freshly cut grass all around me mixed with the smell of late summer wildflowers. Minnow briefly wakes me when she hops up into my lap.
It’s a good Saturday morning. I have no reason to take a nap, but it is a good thing to do and a good place to do it.
Just before I wake, I drift over the edge of dreamland and when I do wake, I recall that in that short dream, I have discovered at last the next answer to my novel’s many unanswered questions.
I weed around the rock border of my dream and I pull away the unwanted crabgrass and I make sure what is left is what I thought I’d discovered. Now I have a way forward. I can see what those golden green eyes see when they look into mine.
