So I'm sitting on my front porch sipping coffee, enjoying the current lack of humidity and the delightful breeze, someone's distant wind chimes and the rise and fall of cicadas singing, or whatever it is they do. Summer is almost over and it didn't go exactly as I'd hoped and planned, but life rarely does.
A garbage truck backs down the road for no obvious reason. I'm thinking about whether it's correct to say in the fall or after the fall, without the phrase being misinterpreted as something religious. Somehow the word autumn seems too formal.
My breeze and cicada and blue sky appreciation is rudely awakened by the strident voice of a woman, "Summer, SUMMER, for God's sake, when are you going to learn to stand up for yourself?"
I look to see a mother pushing a red stroller and ten feet in front of her is a spectacle in pink and purple, a tiny girl wobbling along on a very small bicycle with training wheels and a glittery pink helmet that looks too big for her. I'm guessing her name is Summer.
Next to Summer's mother is another mom pushing a stroller, trying to calm her down. Not happening. Of course, they stop right in front of my house in the shade of the huge maple tree and Summer's mother is totally losing it, "I don't know what is wrong with her. She doesn't have a lick of logic in that brain of hers. After all I've done for her....I'm ready to just give up!"
Walking silently behind them is a large man, slightly overweight, holding the hand of a young boy, clutching an airplane. The man looks like he would rather be tarring a roof or sitting on a John Deere tractor in Kansas, plowing acres of anything, his son seated in front of him.
I wonder to myself, as the breeze dies down, the cicadas and wind chimes are silenced, if this is some sad off-shoot of Parents Without Partners or a play date gone bad, or just a fragment of someone else's life and I didn't get the full story.