Today has brought me where I’ve been before: just past the edge of summer, maybe just a handful of days past, but the subtle decays of late August and the past few weeks have built up until the change seems sudden to me now.
Yesterday, I saw another long flock of grackles on my way north of town. In the garden, swallowtails and monarchs have disappeared. Asters are still at their peak, but the first beggarticks are brown now near the river: white snakeroot is finally breaking down in the woods.
When I look back at my notes for this particular day from previous years, I feel like I am returning, after a long absence, to a comfortable, familiar place. If I remain in that feeling, I can be suspended in this one location and time, outside of the turning of the Earth, outside of the sequence which ages me with one season after another, and which pulls me out of the here and now and this one day.
So I read and reread what I have lived on this day. All of the days seem like one day. I stay and bask in this stasis and suspension of knowledge. I will die, after all, in the procession of days that follows one after another, along the straight road of some near or distant year. But if I stop now and step to the side, I hide the truth in the deception of the present.
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I’ll be back again next week with notes for the third week of early fall. In the meantime. Step to the side. Avoid the truth.
