mistaking it, briefly, for blooms

In the morning, sitting on the wide deck, the air cool and still damp. The quiet settles, comforting and familiar. Even the call of birds seems distant, gently muffled.

From down the road, I can hear someone chopping wood, the rhythmic fall of the axe.

The days are dreamlike, unhurried.

In the afternoon, M. describes the sound of a hummingbird as it hovered close, looking to the folds of the bright deck umbrella, mistaking it, briefly for blooms. And then how it left, its velocity palpable as it sped toward the tree line.

--

We watched the last of Linklater's Before trilogy, Before Midnight. It is 18 years after their first encounter, they are vacationing in Greece with their twin daughters. Their banter is intimate, unguarded, stippled with carelessness of the familiar. A thoughtlessness that can sometimes betray love's petty resentments.

The film builds to an argument that we can see coming, even if we hope to avoid it. And for that time, their futures hinge it seems, on their capacities for self-restraint.

"I don't love you anymore," she says. "I'm done," he says.

Perhaps there is truth in what they say in anger, in frustration, but what they say is only part of what is true.

--

Friends of ours are splitting up after more than twenty years of marriage. There are children. Houses, property. The news was shocking, unsettling, a reminder of how little we know, can really know about the lives of others. There is not much else to say about it except that I wish they didn't have to go through it. There is still, I think, a long road ahead for them, and I wish it didn't have to be.

--

These last few weeks of summer feel very much like the calm before the storm that the school year brings. All its new beginnings and promises, all its expectations and wishes. I make my plans, my checklists; block off hours and days and weeks in my calendar, my notes and assertions in the margins, as if these gestures can keep the future contained, knowable, certain.