Lines From Life and Lines From Fiction

The sandhill crane stalks, strides, runs, flies. Fawns are dropped and, granted good fortune, grow. Garden delphinium blooms, goes to seed; bee balm flowers and fades. Coreopsis gives way to black-eyed Susans. August is here. “Summer’s almost over!” a cashier in town exclaims. During the midafternoon lull at the bookstore, I pick up a novel and begin to read.

…[A]nd the two occupants of the subdued little room managed the slight grimace of politeness that Canadians reserve for moments when they cannot, realistically, go on pretending they are not in the company of another human being.

Day after summer day, keys, glasses, and phones are each in their turn misplaced and eventually rediscovered, right where they were left. The grass grows, we mow the grass.

He wondered idly, as he had always idly wondered at Sunday school, what Abraham and Isaac could have talked about on their way home. 

People ask, “How is your summer going?” I tell them, It’s a blur. But once in a while there are quiet, still, sunlit moments. A moment in which to watch a chipmunk that is watching back with shining, bright-dark eyes.

It wasn’t the objects. It wasn’t Northern style. It was the way memory curved back through time, the way hope reached forward, that made summer seem enduring. It was the steady accumulation of summers past and summers yet to come that saved the present from being over as soon as it began.

The lines in black are from my life. Those in blue are from Summer Gone, a novel by David MacFarlane.