September

"You're what the autumn knew would happen
 After the collapse of primary color
once the last absolutes were torn to pieces
You could begin." 
(Adrienne Rich | November 1969)

Sitting, on the last symbolic day of summer, waiting for the rain to start.  Weather dot com has called for rain. CNN has called for rain.   But the skys are blue, and though the air in Boston has begun to taste like fall, I'm thinking we've all been fooled again.

September has become such a strange month.  Once home only to my birthday and the start of school,  it has juxtaposed two of our largest national catastrophes.  Both unimaginable: one because of how terrifyingly unnatural it was, how blanketly man-made and hellish, and the other because out of nowhere, something as simple as water became a WMD.

It's remarkable, the absolute ordinariness of some of the things that can level us.  It's surprising, even now, how you can feel things changing in a vague and prodigeous way.