I took art lessons for a couple months last year. It was pretty awesome. The art teacher wanted me to draw pictures of live animals. Well, our animals wouldn't hold still for me; so I settled for pictures of our animals. The above picture is the fourth animal picture I ever drew. It is of my cat, Greyholm. Unfortunately, he disappeared when he was about five-years-old. 

And while I was doing a poetry class a year or two before art lessons, I was commissioned to write an elegy of sorts for a family pet. I chose my cat since he was one of the few animals I ever picked. I've been meaning to polish the poem all up, but here are a few lines that I especially liked from it:

I am not a cat person,

But you were a cat-

A small one, dirty and thin.

I would have resisted-

I could have,

But your need caused me to cave,

You skinny, straggling shadow.

More than once, I regretted the cave.

....

Then you weren't so bad for a cat,

And I think you thought, for a human,

I was at least decent.

...

In fact, you never gazed up at me in offense,

But silently understood like a cat really ought not.

You were my first, gray hair,

And I doubt you will be my last.

Whenever and wherever I was, you were there

For five short years, and I think,

We made a fine pair -

For a 'not a cat person' and cat.

That eye - it took me 30 minutes. I'm trying to get back into the drawing habit since I kinda fell out of it during the Summer. Anyway. I started with pencil and faces in the very beginning, strangely, and I think at this rate, they will be my best.

 

I am not made for Summer. Through those three months, I am only half alive, dragging myself along through the lists of things to do. Once in awhile my head will lift up when I see a butterfly go past. They are so fragile. So wonderfully, marvelously fragile, and their lives are so short. I watch as their wings become tattered and their colors fade. Soon, I'll find them places where they ought not be. Dead. Why were they created if they only live for so short a time? Sometimes I think they must have been created for people like me.



This year, I was out working in the front flowerbed late one evening when three hummingbirds decided to keep my company. I was working right below the butterfly bush which was what they were attracted to. It didn't matter how close I was. After a few minutes of watching me from an old dead tree on the corner of the lawn, they came near and drank. Most of the time we only have fly by hummingbirds. One second they're in our yard, and the next second they are gone. Never three at once.


Sometimes I forget my dislike of Summer and marvel at the incredible way things grow in spite of the heat (except for this year. This year everything in the growing department stunk. Except the volunteer cosmos growing where they weren't suppose to. Of course). I guess, besides butterflies, gardens are what makes Summer worthwhile to me. Gardens and lots and lots of flowers. I probably would have been swallowed whole if my garden produced like previous years (except last year because of the drought we had), but it might have been worth it. A garden isn't suppose to be a depressing place. This is a picture of last year's. I have no idea what was this year's problem was. This drought garden does not look shabby at all, though...I honestly forgot what it looked like.


Next week we're suppose to have the first frost. The day after the first frost is a bit of a downer. I always dread it usually, but not this year. There isn't honestly anything worthy of mourning if it freezes.

Now, as the first bits of Autumn sneak in, I am coming back alive. There is just something so invigorating. So fresh. So stimulating about Autumn. Maybe I feel this way because I was born in Autumn, but with that logic, I should also like mornings since I was born then, but I don't. Well, I don't necessarily not like mornings. It's just the getting up part.

I love every bit of Autumn (minus the frost). I love jackets. And hot cocoa. And my wrist warmers. I love doing more cooking and baking and writing (hopefully) and other kinds of work. I love the leaves changing colors. The smell of woodstoves. Remembering apple harvest time when I was younger and my grandpa still had orchard. They would pick the apples the week of my birthday which is later than most growers pick their apples, but my grandpa used to wait until his Goldens were actually ripe. They were so delicious. There won't ever be any apples as good as his.

One of my big brothers, my grandma, and me out in the orchard during springtime. Still got that hat.

 I didn't say anything. I never say anything. I just smile.

I smiled when our eyes met. Two strangers sitting on a bench in front of an old library somewhere in Virginia.  She was a native, freely greeting the pastor of her church as he came out of the library. I was, out of place, stuck in a city of unfamiliar familiarity, of diversity.

Then she said it. "You have a beautiful smile."

I didn't say anything. I didn't know what to say. My smile just grew a little larger and my cheeks turned a little pinker than they already were on the hot, humid afternoon. 

Somebody asked her if the bus heading back to the main Fredericksburg bus station stopped there. She said she didn't know. She was a native taking the transportation system for the first time. Like me, she could only hope. 

She noticed my interest when the question was asked. "You don't live here?"

I shook my head. "Washington...State."

"What is it like?"

I glanced around. Green. Trees. Old buildings. Everywhere I looked.  There was nothing
I could use as a foundation on which to paint a picture of my home for her. I could say things like 'dust devils', 'tumbleweeds', 'sagebrush', 'antelope bush', 'rabbit bush', 'cheat grass', 'high elevation desert', but the words would only create vague pictures of a scene from a Western. Like a John Wayne or a Roy Rogers, but home wasn't like that. It was much more.

I tried. I tried to create an image in her mind with my non-definite words, only puzzling her more as I added words like 'snow' and 'single digit temperatures'. It was a contradiction. An enigma. She was fascinated by this area so unlike the places she knew. 

A bus pulled up. We glanced at each other briefly before realizing we would be sharing the first trek of our journey. Back towards her home. My motel. 

We shared a seat and smile as a friendly man told anyone who'd listen about feeding raccoons in the woods behind his house. Of living off of welfare. Of ending up at the hospital after being stabbed. Half true. Half false.

She told me about her family. A handful and a half of kids. Twice as many God-children. I told her about my family. I was young. I only had a father, a mother, three brothers, one sister. 

We reached the crossroads where our pathways split. Her bus towards dinner and home. My bus towards a motel on the edge of town. Our goodbye was hasty and yet hesitant. She wasn't a stranger. I wasn't in the unfamiliar familiar. 

Then she was gone, and to think, we met only because I missed the bus I was suppose to take. 

(This is a somewhat fictionalized version of a memory from about six years back when we were on the East Coast for a brother's graduation from OCS. I was 14.)