Pastorals

By noon, now in mid-September, tall shadows are already looming, dark and melodramatic, striping the lawn and garden. Friendly ghosts remain, but most of the guests have receded, each taking with them a jar of applesauce to taste or inhale and remember. Or to give away. Emptier, the house seems both bigger and smaller. A cycle fills with stillness. Silence grows on the trees. These last mornings I put on the rubber boots I bought at Morrison's Feed Bag, the crimson boots imprinted with yellow chickens, and head out across the cold wet spiderweb-spangled grass toward the Duchess tree. "May something always go unharvested," wrote Robert Frost. Almost everything goes unharvested. I pick an apple up and take a bite.

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