Two days ago I went out for a run and got caught in a downpour. I wasn’t far from home — only about four blocks — when a dense sheet of warm rain swept out of the north, covered trees and houses like a drop cloth, and sent water pouring off the hood of a Dodge pickup parked along the curb. Even if I turned back, I knew I’d get drenched, so I sloshed on down Twelfth Avenue, the gutters coursing with brown water. I splashed around a rain-pelted backhoe clawing at asphalt and past head-lit cars stopped near the high school. Water streamed off the brim of my white cap, and my shoes squished with every sodden step through puddles roiling in the deluge. I ran nearly two miles, my shirt clinging like spandex on a washed-up pop star, before the rain stopped as abruptly as it began. The sun broke through cracks in the dark clouds, and a seam of blue sky brightened the hilltops west of town.
For the past few weeks a late-summer swampiness had hung over northeast Pennsylvania, leaving green algae growing on the white vinyl siding of houses and garages, but once this rainstorm moved through, the air behind it was scrubbed clean and wrung dry. That evening starlings and blackbirds congregated silently in the top of the dead tree above the river as I threw open the windows upstairs and downstairs — the catbirds, cardinals, and robins whose songs had long filled the cedars surrounding the deck out back glaringly quiet. When night fell and darkness filled the valley, the steady drone of crickets and katydids swelled all around and strummed against the screens, and it seemed, suddenly, that fall was upon us.
Though I’m not ready for summer to end, the change will eventually bring its own gifts: tree-covered hills dappled with orange and yellow in late-afternoon shafts of sunlight, overgrown ditches stabbed with blood-red sumac, heavy seed heads pulling the tall grasses toward the river’s listless current, a morning chill that calls for a sweatshirt, and the world slowly retreating as darkness seeps into late afternoon and nudges dawn away like a bothersome child.
Eventually I’ll be ready for this. But not yet.
That evening after showering and hanging my sodden clothes above the deck out back, I had a late supper and, unable to stay awake long enough to read, I tried watching TV, but twice my chin dropped toward my chest and twice I jerked awake, the last time to a burst of laughter on Frasier. I pushed the button on the remote, hoisted myself out of my chair, and turned out the lights.
Though it was still early, I trudged up the stairs — much as I’d done more than thirty-five years ago before my daughter Mary was born. Back then I still worked at Valley View Manor and lived alone in a small square white house in southwestern Minnesota. The upstairs was a cozy finished attic with the chimney’s bare red brick rising through the middle of the floor, a peaked ceiling so low I had to duck under it near the off-white walls, and a burnt-red carpet that still smelled new. Beneath the crank-out skylight, where I watched the moon sink toward the Dakotas, stood a white telescope with black lens caps and tripod. It was a gift from Julie, Mary’s eventual mother, the most thoughtful I’d received to that point in my life. She and I had often trudged out of the house long after midnight, snow heaped on both sides of the sidewalk, and gazed up at the glittering black sky before getting in the Plymouth, the bench seat stiff with cold. So she knew, and knowing led to the telescope. But that was long ago.
I sank into bed before nine, the windows that faced the river wide open, blinds hoisted to the top. From where I lay I could see the black outline of the Appalachians and beyond them the faint glow of Catawissa. Crickets and katydids thrummed. A truck crossing the bridge downshifted. Then, the world was gone.
Sometime later I woke, the neighborhood quiet, the window now bright, and a square of light cast by the rising moon sprawled across the west wall. I pushed the sheet and blanket off, swung my feet to the floor, felt for my glasses on the small bookshelf, and checked the time: 4 a.m. I slowly stood and eased past the foot of the bed, careful in the darkness not to stub my toe on the caster, and went to the window.
There in the southeastern sky stood Orion, his belt a tight line of three bright stars, his left foot marked by Rigel, the fifth brightest in the night sky, and his broad shoulders by Betelgeuse and Bellatrix, names I memorized during those long-ago winters in Minnesota. Here was that familiar constellation — the Hunter forever pursuing Lepus, the Hare — rising toward autumn and higher still into the coming winter as if to reach a height from which he might see spring.
I leaned on the sill, unable to deny the lateness of both the hour and the season and that his climb had already begun.
