Late Solstice

I could hear the sun grind to a halt in the sky above those shingled single-family rooftops. I could hear the mandibular squeak and shuffle of Japanese beetles mating in iridescent brown clusters on the tattered rose bushes. I could hear a blimp somewhere overhead droning under the weight of advertisements for motor oil (starboard) and steel-belted radials (port). And I could hear the clunk and tick of bocce balls and old men's knees as they examined the workings of that great lawn-clock of a game that marked the passage of the summer's afternoons.

And then the driver pulled the lever, tattooed arm already tan, and the door squealed open onto weeks upon weeks—a future stretching beyond the imagination—of limitless possibility.

*

"Go on, son," he said, smiling, "It's summer."

*

—Steve Kilian
------------------------------- Wolcott Pond

------------------------------- Fixing the Banks