The Heat of Autumn
By Jane Hirshfield
The heat of autumn
is different from the heat of summer.
One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
One is a dock you walk out on,
the other the spine of a thin swimming horse
and the river each day a full measure colder.
A man with cancer leaves his wife for his lover.
Before he goes she straightens his belts in the closet,
rearranges the socks and sweaters inside the dresser
by color. That's autumn heat:
her hand placing silver buckles with silver,
gold buckles with gold, setting each
on the hook it belongs on in a closet soon to be empty,
and calling it pleasure.
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Monday started out feeling like summer with rain and a cold front forecast for later, so I woke up with a bit of a weather headache and was a little sleepy all day. It was mostly a chore day for me anyway -- loads of laundry moved around piles of books also moved. I wanted to put some of the art books upstairs and get rid of some fanzines I haven't looked at in 20 years, but I found some real treasures I've meant for ages to donate to one of the universities that keep zine libraries and some that are purely personal treasures, like autographed copies by friends from fandom of many, many years.
We took a walk in the late afternoon just as the rain started and wound up getting pretty wet, though it was also cooler and smelled good out, then I scanned some art from the zines I had found and wrote to potential recipients. We had sausage with cider apple sauce for dinner before a Monday episode of The Masked Singer (the World Series will be on Fox on Wednesday), followed by the Seahawks-Saints game in very rainy Seattle where I'm hoping my kids have power since I've read that there are a lot of outages. Here are some photos of the leaves turning at Lake Needwood over the weekend:
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