The Last Day of Summer

What better way to spend the last day of summer than at the beach?

We’re staying in a house up on stilts a short walk from the beach. In the early morning, sitting on the veranda, you can hear crickets and cicadas in the fields, and birds singing on the utility wires. In the evening, choruses of frogs replace the birds of the morning. There’s the scent of the fresh-cut grass from the field across the way, mixed with the aroma of the Gulf carried up by the south-easterly breeze. Every once in a while, someone drives by, sticks an arm out the window of a pickup truck and waves.

Down on the beach, you mostly hear the surf and the calling of the gulls. In the middle of the week, the beach is empty, except for a fisherman or two. They are pretty friendly, old folks for the most part, and you eventually realize that they stop to chat because they see you as one of them — just another old geezer with time to spare. The air today has a particular freshness, a hint that the season is about to change. It’s still hot — we’re in Texas after all — but the heat is just a little less aggressive.

We are doing nothing much — reading books, cooking a light meal, walking in the surf and ignoring our cell phones, mostly. To send the summer off, we went out on the beach at sunset and watched Venus shining brightly in the darkening sky and saw the stars come out over the water.

Tomorrow will feel much the same, but it will be autumn, and another year will speed to its end.

A Princess and her Retainers

Lillian, the Fairy Princess and her step Mom, Amy, at St. Thomas’ Fall Fair.

Conversations While Walking

It’s a glorious warm autumn day in Houston, the kind of day that tempts people to move here, only to have their lives shattered by August ten months later.

On days like this, when we have no where else to go, Lillian and I sometimes walk the mile or so home from school along the small bayou (or, as you might call it, drainage ditch) where there are sticks and wild flowers to find, and grass to pick, and squirrels and birds to chase.

Today, Lillian found a small branch. She pointed to a large gooey brown pile in the grass.

“ePa,” she said, “What’s that?”

“Dog poo,” I said.

“Is it GranAnne’s dog’s poo?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh. Is it some other dog’s?”

“Probably.”

“Do all dogs poo?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Why?”

(ePa attempts to distill his vast knowledge of biology and canine excretory systems into language a four-year old might understand): “Just because.”

“Ok. Do Jack-o-Lanterns poo?”

“I don’t believe they do. No.”

“Why?”

“Look, Lillian, over there: it’s a squirrel. Go chase it.”

Someone thinks maybe it’s autumn

Lillian Grace.

Cookie Eating Al Fresco

Denbys Together

Lillian went out to a fall fair with her dad Josh and his wonderful folks, Peggy and Keith Denby, who are down this weekend from Huntington. She likes pumpkins.

Pointing and Naming

While her mom is hanging out at Methodist Hospital, Lillian has been hanging out in city parks. At Meyerland Park, there is a plaque on one of the play structures that has shapes and numbers engraved into it. Lillian loves to point to things and have you say their names to her, though she usually doesn’t say much herself; and she thought this plaque was very interesting. We spent a good long while at the park playing the pointing and naming game with the numbers.

At one point I said to her, “You’re very good at this, you know.”

“I know,” she replied, very distinctly and very smugly.

Two years old and already working on the attitude!

Napping