Friday, Towards Next September

So, tell me a story.

Tell me the one about that terribly hot day. The one back in 1963.

Or let's say it was an unforgiving summer that rode on past fall and well into winter. You're still young. All there is, is possibility. That, and the fear that your individual ambitions are beginning to tear at you.

Your love affair, after fifteen years is heat in bed, still warm at the dinner table.

Supper demands complete attention. Not in its preparation, just getting it on to the table. Prep has been reduced to the lowest common denominator. Food groups and quantity. Enough to feed five hungry kids and two tired adults.

A system of rotating frozen vegetables with fresh ones and switching fruit salads (jello again...?) with cottage cheese. Add a loaf of bread, (on a plate) and margarine and you're almost there.

Depending on the time of the month and how lucrative the month has been decides the main course; spaghetti or hamburger gravy. Spanish rice or fish sticks. His famous every-owl stew reheated? Apples for dessert.

If its a flush month, top-round is being grilled out by the pool.

Saved generally for weekends so the kids can stay wet late, you turn on the underwater light and offer lamps down low and fresh towels in each of the cabanas. Even the little kids are pretty well water-proofed now and can climb out, get dry and jammy up by themselves.

The smell of the browning meat, mushrooms, garlic and onion sizzling above the gas broiler mingles faintly with chlorine. Geranium and mint at the back door grow thick beneath the dripping faucet that keeps Riley's bowl filled.

California's baked grasslands are swishing this evening while up in the mountains a distant wildfire sends the fragrance of moonlight across the valley floor. The sky is tea house blue.

Once the kids are all are tucked in, the older ones happy with books and their privacy, you stroll out to the field, blanket in tow. Just the two of you.

Lying in the waist high grass brings on laughter. Stories of camping trips back before you'd met. Parodies on last week's election debacle. You're both great story tellers and now the tears just roll along with a delicious melt of tension. Any fear of snakes is sternly forbidden.

A feather intently drawn across your belly triggers all the right responses.

Screeching plunge of nighthawk. Has the field begun to quiver?

Somewhere across the tops of yellow grass lies tomorrow and the city, but not now.