I woke up late again.   Can’t seem to make the dawn date anymore.    When the stars and the moon and the planets are still sighing, trying to hang on a little longer to the quiet soft and peaceful realms far away from that tiny awful planet.  No matter how tiny and insignificant it seems sometimes, it is awful, insidious, evil like a mosquito.

I haven’t seen a mosquito for awhile.   Even they are leaving.  And flies.  Gone too.

Centipedes now here and there in the basement.  To annoy us.  To remind us we are not alone.  No mice.  It is still too warm and they stay outside somewhere waiting.

The trees are dropping leaves.  The Linden next door drops masses of them brown and crinkly instead of yellow smooth silky.  My Serviceberries are stilted quiet somber and too are dropping leaves, so silently like someone whispering goodbye.  The bright scarlets and oranges, maroons and yellows, are gone it seems.  Forever? To another planet maybe where there is still time for happy summer skies.

I water these trees and water and water and still they stay sullen and dull.  The birds even stay away.   They come and go in the night and the very early dawn.

My neighbors are in Wales.  Hiking up some verdant path maybe.   Drinking in a pub and listening to stories of old.   In the mist in the rain in a pale sun maybe.  In a castle or a cottage where things perhaps are green and growing still.

Their garden is thriving.  Zinnias tall as shrubs.   Their tomato plants still lush and jungly green.  The tomatoes ripening and heavy on the vine.   I pick them almost every day and eat them there and then. My tomato plants are thin and spindly and have ties around them trying to hold them up.   The stems and branches rotting and flimsy like an old person who can barely stand.  But there is fruit, lots of fruit but barely hanging on.   A squash planted itself near the Chocolate Sprinkles and is growing there part mildewy grey and part true green, and sends out large showy yellow flowers….. I should eat those too but I let them rot.  There are no squash.

My neighbor and I bought pots of colorful flowers in June.  Pots filled with massive pink fuchsia, lavender, white, and deep purple petunias, lobelia, and  verbena.  Mine are pale and spindly have a few flowers here and there.  Their pots are massive, grown three times as large with showy big monster blooms more purple and pink and white and lavender then in June.

I, who wander in and out of gardens from dawn to dusk and in between.  Pinching and watering and sighing and hovering.  My garden wanes and theirs waxes coming into a full moon of bloom brighter and deeper and more glorious than mine will ever be………..they with their casual attitude or maybe it’s just happy. Peaceful serene come what may.  They come and go and when they return their garden is happy and bright their tomatoes still waiting in October for the salad bowl.

My garden is full of grey mists and tiny lavender asters that look like fog.  White spurge that looks like winter’s breath.   Tiny leaves that have no color left.   Vincas that have stopped. Roses that have disappeared.   Caladmiums that just said I have had enough.  Black petunias that disappeared twice.  Yellow coleus that let themselves be devoured by some worm. Ah, but by the back door there is a mass of purple asters that decided to stay and the huge ash tree hiding that mansion, the forbidden ash is very big and green and will eat my house maybe soon.  I can’t wait.

I walked out early this morning,  as early as I could…..walking down the path from my back door I thought I saw black and blue birds crinkled up and dying on the gravel driveway but this was something deep something more purple than the sky, more purple than the overripe grapes still dangling from the vines, this was the purple of kings and queens the rich robes of something no one yet has ever seen and in between there was blue bluer than anyones eyes bluer than any robin egg bluer than the very sky…… I counted them these baubles these jewels these living vessels holding up some secret elixir some secret perfume some secret fallen from the sky……. looking down on that dry and dusty gravel driveway someone had scattered 18 morning glories for my weary eyes…..