T.

Spirits ran fairly high all summer, despite the barrage of seemingly never-ending Major Life Events. Walks to-and-from work buzzed with activity: people gardening, people playing music with all the doors and windows open, people walking to the store. Children riding bikes, children in the middle of the street with balls, children on the sidewalk, bright chalk at hand.

Fresh-cut grass, smoke from a grill, the sweet vanilla breeze from my neighbor's hedge in bloom. From every house and from every life: evidence of the here & now.

A child's cry from down the alley. From an open kitchen window, the clink of dishes being washed. From the synagogue: chanting, or prayer, low and rhythmical.

Life hummed along at a pleasant pitch. Bees hummed in lavender, and if someone told me that tomatoes hummed in their ripening in parking-strip gardens, I would have listened, and I would have heard.

Then every evening: dinner in the garden, a glass of wine beneath the kiwi and grape vines, an abundance of birds in the apple trees. I existed outdoors: a walk around the block at dusk, a midnight accounting of stars from my upstairs balcony.

And now with autumn in full leaf-fall, everything appears shut down, closed out, turned inwards. My one-mile on-foot commute is minus the soundtrack of people living their urban lives. Curtains are drawn, windows latched. And only a few bees persist on the last few flowers: cosmos, calendula, here and there a dwindling rose. A sudden damping-down in the volume of life, a volume that, in summer, was easy to keep wound-up.

Descending into melancholy.
Feeding it, one song at a time.