This is what fall looks like in the southeast: mums and pumpkins appear at the market, you can open the windows and hear the college football game being played three miles down the road, and the cotton comes out. The leaves don't change--much. And the highs are still in the seventies. But drive the bypass around town, or take a quick drive out to the fields, and there are little white puffs down the long rows of what used to be nondescript green bushes. Around Thanksgiving, the farmers will harvest the cotton, and they'll stack up huge white bales in the fields, and bits will blow off and collect in the grass on the side of the road. It's the closest this part of Georgia gets to snow.
(In the next few weeks, some of my eight-o'clock students will come to class wearing Northfaces and complaining about how cold it is and I will try not to laugh.)
Today, we opened the house up, maybe for real this time. The sky is so very vast and blue. The breeze feels like an actual, refreshing breeze, not the warm and sticky dying breath of a huge water buffalo. The last peaches and tomatoes and corn have straggled to the little market downtown. The first days of actual, humidity-less fall down here are like spring up north: there's that one day in March when the temp hits fifty, and everyone rolls down their windows, and the college students climb out of their second-story windows and drink beer on the roof. There's a collective sigh of relief And even though this summer felt as if it lasted forever, this is generally just how I feel every September. Up north, or out on the plains of Minnesota, or down here, it's the same every year: I can't wait for the start of the next season, and rotate the sheets on the bed, and open the windows to the sounds of the little city we currently call home.
No comments:
Post a Comment