Letter from Birdland--Eventide

It's dark out and the chickens are in bed. The ducks go in on their own now, and sleep in the chicken coop, but they intimidate the chickens, who roost up on the roof, and I have to go out and catch each one and put them in and shut the door. Better that I catch them than the coyotes, but they still make a big fuss. I should be planning for tomorrow's class, but instead I am baking cookies and next week's bread, and thinking of my niece, Alexsis, in New Haven.

She is the one who first made me an aunt, and it's astounding that the little bald-headed walking, talking baby I called Lexicon is suddenly a young woman, suddenly gone halfway across the country, away to college. I hear by the grapevine that she is homesick, and her facebook page has notes like, "Desperately missing Home." This week I am putting together a little care package to send her, hoping just to brighten her day, wishing I could do more--maybe drive out and get her--but that would be exactly the wrong thing to do. I know that this is something she just has to go through, but that doesn't make it any easier for her or for my sister, or for a doting auntie.

A large moth is beating its wings against the dark window above the oven. It  seems desperate to get in to the light of the kitchen. It stops for a second and perches on the corner of the pane like a small bird. I can see its big, dark eyes in a face that is strangely human. Its wings beat suddenly again, and it seems to want to come in so badly that I am tempted to open the window, but I know it would be a mistake. The kitchen is not what it really wants.

I make one tray of cookies, and then, what the heck? I put in another tray. I'll send some up to Dylan too, who I am also missing. What is it about the end of summer that makes me lonesome? The earlier fall of dusk? The end of the peaches? The slow toasting of the cornfields? Well, it's not so much the end of the peaches as knowing how many peaches I missed. I'm not, like Frost, "...overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired."
I have not had enough of peaches or pies or fruit salad or summer. Maybe it reminds me, too, of the end of all the summers of my childhood. The end of camping trips out at Kickapoo (which will now, apparently, end for everyone for a long time, unless we do something about it--but that's a topic for another letter) the end of swimming at the pool, the end of weekday overnights with friends, and periodically, the end of my old, familiar school--the beginning of a new, scary one.

This afternoon L.S. and I went down to visit the aunts. We brought hopeful baskets, even though I was pretty sure peach season was over. Aunt Kate thought that the smaller tree may have some, and, indeed, it does ripen a little later than the big tree. It was actually a compost tree, sprung up from pits in the compost pile. Its peaches are not quite as sweet or as big as the mother tree, but sweet enough. As we talked, L.S. went out to check for peaches. He came back, instead, with a basket of apples. The apples are lumpier than the peaches, but will still make some very nice pies after we cut the worms out.

I’m getting sleepy, and the cookies are cool now. I'll put them in cans and send them in the morning mail.

Walk in Beauty; Work in Peace; Blessed Be.