Fairy Potions and Kangaroos

Fall moves south 200 miles per day, they say.

Zippity-zip.

This year I guess it decided to move a thousand miles a day and it’s already in Mexico because it snowed on the mountain last night and I don’t know if I can handle seven full months of winter.

‘I’m sure it’s an Indian Summer’, he says.

‘It was 70 degrees in January a few years ago’, I volunteer.

‘That’s not an Indian Summer by definition’, he says.

‘Well, whatever,’ I say. After all, I was just sayin’.

The sticker bushes aren’t stickery any more…their burrs carried off by all the neighborhood dogs and redistributed into everyone’s houses where most of them get sucked up in a vacuum on Saturday morning and they end up in the dump.  Do sticker bushes grow at the dump? The heated dog bowl is filled with water and sits outside, evaporating itself away. You hope the tomatoes didn’t freeze last night but you don’t want to go outside to check and you wonder again where the mosquitos hide when it’s cold. You hope the quail couple and their babies who live in the bush across the way are doing okay. And you wonder why you don’t have feathers so you could be nice and toasty warm. It’s a miracle humans survived this long with just our wimpy old skin.

You already developed the cold that you only get when Fall turns to Winter and you hope it isn’t a sinus infection but your face kind of feels like it got kicked by a really angry donkey.  Or a kangaroo. You turn the heat on and you can only find one of your little sockies that have the non-slip-grip so you wear just the one and your other foot is cold even under the blankets. You try to make the dogs curl up on your other foot but they look at you like you’re weird and slide under the bed so you get up and make yourself a cup of tea labeled something clever like, ‘Fairy Potion’. It smells so good you want the smell to stay trapped in your nose forever and then maybe the Fairy Potion will magically heal your face.

And you forgot to just get another sock while you were up. But it’s too hard to get up again just for a sock.

The coyotes were crazy last night. Four sessions of screaming into the windy, stormy black sky. Maybe when it is cold, the jack rabbits stay in their little hole-houses and the coyotes can just wander through the bush-aisles to pick up their groceries. Maybe the screaming was because their tummies were warm and full.

I don’t ever feel like screaming after dinner, but to each his own.

The leaves on the trees didn’t even have a chance to put on their necklaces of fabulous reds and beautiful golds and vivid oranges. The cherry tree looks like it needs last rites.

I wonder who you call for that.

So hello and goodbye, my friend Fall. I just decided you were pretty cool, and then you took a job way-way-far-away.

Sounds like I need a trip to Mexico. Just to hang out with the Fall.