Summer's End
The porch swing creaks its familiar elegy beneath me—metal chains against wood, against time. Coffee gone cold in my hands, bitter as the dying light. I am fixed here like a specimen pinned to velvet, watching the day bleed out through oak leaves.
The trees stand brooding, their bark scarred with decades I will never know. What lovers carved initials here? What children built kingdoms in their roots? The woods keep their secrets pressed tight between rings of growth, dark and impenetrable as my own heart some days.
Night slides down like black silk, pooling in the hollows between branches. The cicadas begin their desperate chorus—seventeen years underground for this one summer song, this frantic declaration of existence before the cold comes. Their voices rise and fall, rise and fall, a symphony of urgency.
Late August pretends to be summer still, but the air carries autumn's ghost. I taste it on my tongue—crisp apples not yet harvested, woodsmoke from fires not yet lit, the particular thrill of changing seasons. Everything golden deepens to amber. Everything alive prepares for transformation.
The swing moves gently, pushed by night wind that smells of earth and ending leaves. I am both observer and participant in this daily ritual of surrender, this cosmic exhalation that pulls daylight down into shadow. The coffee cup grows warm again in my palms, heated by my own living body—proof that I am still here, still breathing while the world performs its ancient theater of transformation.
Somewhere in the oak cathedral, an owl calls. Once, twice. The sound cuts through cicada song like a blade through fabric, clean and final. I think of all the small creatures moving through darkness now, following instincts older than thought, older than this house, this swing, this woman drinking cold coffee and watching night fall like a curtain on summer's last act.
The stars emerge one by one, pinpricks of light in velvet vastness. I sit in witness to this daily death and resurrection, this turning wheel that grinds us all to dust and gold and memory. Tomorrow the sun will rise again. Tonight, I let the darkness take me, let it wash over the porch, the trees, the singing insects with their brief and beautiful lives.
The swing stills. Even the cicadas quiet their desperate song. In the silence between heartbeats, I hear the woods whispering their secrets to the wind.