Snapshot: Two Falls

Eighty degrees in March is not a thing I'm accustomed to, nor the rattling of these leaves across pavement, a rattling that is like a second fall. Charleston's trees, like huskies it seems, shed twice a year or in shifts. And so, my mind and memory are lost this morning. The patio door stands open and the sounds themselves are conflated, conflicted, and confused. The birdsong wakens the sleeping neuron repositories of all the southern springs I've lived and all those I've missed in other lands and climes, but those leaves . . . those leaves, whatever they really are, my mind knows as the sound of water oaks' sheddings driven like horizontal cataracts down Stephens St as I sit in my Spitfire in my driveway in Goldsboro with the top down and sip dry sack sherry in the manner of that Falstaff whose discretion was no form of valor at all and listen to JT's Dad Loves His Work and have no inkling yet of the choices good and bad that will take my life from that more timely autumn to this second fall that is like, in so many ways, a second spring too, not outside that patio screen so much as within. And within, all time present in every moment, old ties renewed touch better selves only dormant. A squadron of phoenixes. And always, gratitude for and comfort in the harbor that exists, away from this harbor town, but within always. Days, and there again and whole.