Whoosh
After we finished vacuuming our house, my wife feels free to water her menagerie of plants, a plump chicken is roasting in the oven, and childhood memories softly return. It's Sunday, and my mother long gone would have called our cursory cleaning “redding up.” Pittsburgh was usually cooler in October, though the sun was shining in all its glory, and the colored leaves had just started their annual drop from the oaks, maples, and sycamores to conjure up their fragrant peppery fall musk. Every year smells a little different. Two or three blue jays metallically call, off in the distant treetops, as they did back then, their voices scraping like the opening and closing of an aluminum screen door as they shamelessly yearn to re-connect with each other. Wearing a thin jacket, I was lying on my back in the backyard of a friend’s house just up the street and would hear an occasional lone car soothingly whoosh across a busy intersection in our neighborhood. Whoosh. I felt safer indulging in nothingness back there because that's what backyards are for, freer to look up into the empty blue through the branches angling like crooked elbows dangling in a cloudless sky, the sun blazed overhead, dozens and dozens of appendages casting dappled and lacey shadows on my green carpet of grass. Whoosh. Our wind chimes now signaling a light breeze in the present, my dog pawing at my leg for attention, and then barking at me to pull myself up and out of my chair to play in our backyard on this bright, warm, Autumn afternoon.