September 11, 2001

You can just start to feel the fall in the air. Things smell different, more like old wet leaves and earth, than dust and cut grass. I have green tomatoes that are hanging on the vine right now. A while back, the older boy and his friend, Levi, picked every little green tomato that they could find. They had made up some game where they were making soup in the sandbox or something. I’m actually surprised that I have any tomatoes at all, green or otherwise being that only two months ago the vines were empty. If I can just get a few more weeks of sun…

Who am I kidding? It’ll be green tomato pickles for the lot of them.

Got the fence up and stained over the last few weeks. That will probably be the last of the summer outdoor projects for this year. Minnie and Otto are planning to leave the Midwest for a bit and come visit us the beginning of October. It’s been awhile since they’ve been out our way and were looking forward to their company. Dewy and Ham decided to paint their pink mobile home a wedding-mint green. The color isn’t so bad really it’s just that they decided to leave the door pink. Now I keep expecting Crockett and Tubbs to come and bust the place. Pepper, their dog, has taken to eating the bugs he digs out of an old rotting tree stump.

Sweetie found our old flag in a box somewhere and I’ve attached it to the antenna on the roof of the mobile home. We have cable; it’s just that I’ve just never managed to take it down for some reason. The flag just hangs there limp, in the still wet air.

I dreamt last night that a pair of swallows had come and built a nest up there, right on top of where I hung the flag. Someone had come by and pressure washed the house so it was all clean and shinny. I was mad because I thought they were going to shit all over our clean roof so I was yelling at them, trying to chase them off. Sweetie came out onto the stoop and told me breakfast was waiting inside. After I had eaten I went back outside to do some more yelling. They had torn the flag into shreds and were using it to line their nest. I woke with this image of that bird peering over the side of his red, white and blue nest with that cockeyed stare that birds have. Looking at me as if asking a question.

“So put a candle in the window
And a kiss upon his lips
Till the dish outside the window fills with rain
Just like a stranger with weeds in your heart
And pay the fiddler off till I come back again

And it’s time, time, time
And it’s time, time, time
And It’s time, time, time that you love
And it’s time, time, time”

Tom Waits

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