Autumn comes slowly this year. The leaves fall before they turn, no match for the storm winds of October.
It rained for nine days straight, and when the water lapped against my ankles, I couldn't convince myself that it was the ocean, overgrown into freshness without salt. It was just puddles, sloshed and muddy, a bit deeper than shallow with the iridescent, poisonous rainbow of petrol-skinned water.
"The flowers hang on," a friend observed the other day, "I can't believe how long they linger in this chill."
Looking up from the ground, I studied the flowers to which he referred. They looked washed out, drained, like silk flowers left in sunlight, faded.
The flowers struggle. The leaves linger, unturned, waiting to die quickly overnight. It seems they want privacy this year.
There's a certain dignity, after all, with changing quietly into something else.