Indian Summer

Not knowing what to do, I walked out the door and into the night.  Years ago, I tore up the lawn alongside the front walk, lining the thin concrete path with roses.  When summer reaches its towering height, I arrange bouquets for my female friends, mixing in lily of the valley and verdant ferns.  Not during autumn, however.  When the last sickly rose of November, shivering at the promise of winter, falls to a pile of petals, I gather them like knowledge and throw them about my room like confetti.  Life begins in spring and ends in autumn, and the winter is spent as a benevolent ghost.  Both wistfully retrospective and gleefully clairvoyant, leaving no tracks in the burial shroud of snow.  Oh, but how the flakes swirl in a flurry about your thoughts.

It was not winter, yet.  Indeed, if ever there was such a thing as an Indian summer, it had arrived.  Technically, the trees have to turn before Indian summer, but I was willing to make an allowance for seventy degrees in October.  It tends to snow by Halloween.  A man in a kilt marched by, playing Scotland the Brave on a set of argyle pipes.  Bagpipes are shockingly loud.   I’ve seen stranger things, and I turn down Prairie Street.  It’s Homecoming Week at the local high school, and a covey of kids threw un-spooling rolls of toiletpaper in the centenarian silver maples.  They’re next door to a middle-aged man’s house who orders delivery, and then never fails to stiff me on the tip.

"Sorry, sir, but we lost your ticket," I said into the receiver, investing my voice with no hint of contrition.  "We found it, but the delivery might take a little longer than we’d told you."  He huffed and puffed, but I couldn’t have cared less.  Why should I?  I lose money to bring him his food.

I knocked on the door, and he answered in a white undershirt and a pair of white briefs.  Are you fucking kidding me?  "I thought you guys said you were gonna be late?" he muttered, managing to sound irritated at my punctuality.  I stared in dumbstruck awe for a moment, before a bit of mischief infested me.

"We were, but then we decided not to cook it."  He froze in the process of handing me a check made out for exact change, and his thick brows stitched together above his crinkled eyes.

"What?" he asked, obviously not amused.

"Yeah, it’s raw," I told him matter-of-factly.  He frowned.

"Why?"

"It’s ’cause you don’t tip, sir."  I smiled as vacantly as possible, while he started in surprise.  After about five seconds of silence, I allowed the insincere smile to segue into a blank expression.  "I’m just kidding.  We cooked it."

I haven’t slept well in years.  Not since I took a nap beneath a southern live oak it seems. Or was it a saguaro cactus?  Or was it beneath a Louis-David print on a couch in Fort Collins, Colorado?  It wasn’t here, I know, in a place where a girl becomes engaged to someone else.  It is one thing to be foolish, but quite another to be a fool.  I sleep alone, now, too, having learned to wake up lonely rather then wake up empty. I don’t dream, either, but I’m alright with that.  It seems to me that we too often waste our dreams in sleep.  Forlorn, but not so forlorn as six weeks ago, I jogged across the street toward  the teenaged kids.  They tensed as if to bolt, but I put my hands up to show my harmlessness.  I’m harmless, right?  I picked up a roll and hurled it through the branches of a tree.