Summer, Years Ago

Summer, Years Ago (see in Gallery / Store)| Image by Bruce Harris

The sky is a jewel. The lake should be so endless and blue. I’m in the backyard on a chaise in the grass. The trees reach to the sky’s rim, a morning stretch through the tips of every leaf. Maple, oak, maybe a century old, tall and worn and waving. Still here. Very alive. The dogs are wrestling. Our dog is an easy one-forty, half Newfoundland, half happy idiot. Our daughter’s pup, a French Bulldog. Thirty five pounds of muscled up drooling snarl. A Harley revving into the day’s winding road. His best friend is four hundred percent his size. That would be like me wrestling with a small Clydesdale.

George Shearing is playing through the open windows of the house. My father-in-law’s favorite. I like him too. To think his mellow feathery blind fingers were dancing across popular music sixty five years ago. He’ll be Florida bound in the fall. My father-in-law, that is.

Maybe I’ll have a grandchild doing the same years from now. Maybe reading under the tree with her dogs, thinking about her own children while contemplating the glowing limey edge of summer leaves a hundred feet high. Like me, Dalva might be the book cracked open. We might share a smile at Harrison’s audacious appetites, wondering about the power of forbidden love. To pick apples simply because you’re hungry and they taste good.

The Frenchy huddles under my bent knees. I can feel his panting against the back of my thighs. His big friend is collapsed at the foot of the chaise. A bird cuts across the cloudless day between sunlit branches traced across what could be heaven. Is it a hawk, a turkey vulture, maybe an eagle? They’re known to frequent these skies. Whatever it is, its wings are wide, its feathers pointed and keen. Another horizon reached in what feels like seconds, in what seems an arrow passing over these ancient blooms.