One Week After the Equinox

The first slightly cooler and drier air is filtering in at dawn this morning. This weekend, it's time to put the cool weather things into the garden: onions and leeks, lettuce and carrots, broccoli and cauliflower. The beans and squash and tomatoes and cucumbers are all blooming, and we're swamped with key limes.

I've been reading Debra Kang Dean's marvelous renku journal of a year in her book Precipitates. Here's a brief passage from the section framing the equinox:

A cup of coffee
to wake with, for a nightcap
two glasses of wine--

you'll find, instead of the silence
you were after, oblivion

like the flood waters,
muddy and thick, making of homes
islanded houses.

Here, a spring-blue sky above
Walden Pond, all aglitter.

Into the water
they faded. Footprints on
the path disappearing...

At trail's edge, a red-spotted
purple emerges, turns back.

This year, for the second
time in equal measure, daylight
clear and cool, cool night.

A time of balance--light and dark, temperate weather, and this year at least, no hurricane crossing the Carribean at the peak of the season. Yesterday afternoon a mockingbird was singing, as if it were spring.