With the cool and dews of morning dawns that lingered and lasted longer into days, Annie’s wanderlust returned. On tips of the trees, colors hidden in season of green began their showing through: yellow tipped ash and elms, red hints in the scarlet oaks, and spectrum of landscape maple shades.
Behind her home, Annie rested in Adirondack chair as she mused on landscape’s accents: splayed heads of big bluestem on stalks of tan curing into winter’s blood-dried red, stolon bases thick with leaf, green edges paling in cure to autumn browns and beige through season’s living changing. Taupe feather-heads of Indiangrass shone, leaves and stems still rich and green—the last of the natives to grow and head; their cycle last of the summer grasses—all in an Indian summer, shooting, rising, flush in taupe-tipped accent all in the Indian summer, when sun’s already turned and inevitability of autumn is upon, but in the last heat and skies and summer songs one believes it all might live forever; but all the while, Indian summer is echelon of autumn announcing.
Interspersed amongst the grasses, forbs still cast their blooms bearing flowers and setting seed until frost kill ended cycle. Annie gazed on these and watched as butterflies flittered, coming to rest with slow and fanning wings, broadening in spread and stretch, over nectar-scented blooms.
Beside her, James rested, looking on the same. He smelled of wooden smoke from fire pit in night before and of sharper masculine musk from after-fire in the freeing of her own femininity. She stared on the ash in fire pit before them, breathing deep his presence in the cool day air, smiling and a flitter low in self at the way scents restore remembrances into sense.
Breathing in, and gazing on all of scene—grasses, forbes, butterflies, and clouds in blue sky of above—she played with her hair, hand running through its strands, tousling light, shaping greater body and style as mind did same to form of thought.
Day was season and world in change.
Observing, James discerned. Feeling noticed and read, Annie smiled, sighing light, her sound and breath and mood airy as blue above.
“What are you thinking?” James asked.
She tousled her hair further, canting head to side as she gazed still to blue and sky above as if, in its spanse, she might see and find her answer.
There was only blue and dreams of shapes she could not form.
She shrugged her head, a final soft shake and play of hand in drawn hair to top of head, then shifted in her seat, crossed legs uncrossing, switching, returning back to still and viewing rest.
Her answer was in the sky, in the view, but definition was unformed. She dreamed of mountains east and west, of snow-capped crowns and sides of shadows, greens, and stands of gold. She thought too of softer slopes, lower crests, and older hills worn and weathered before earth ever thrust the newer into form, their sides the full of autumn’s hues—hickories, oaks, and sycamores along river runs that held as clouds and mist in settle of the valleys at daybreak in autumn air.
He knew her ways, her moods, and when her restlessness and wanderlust returned.
He smiled, desiring to be part and company to her adventures and searchings—whatever it was she sought in the changing of scene and space.
“Where do you want to go?” James asked.
Hand returned to hair, teasing and tousling light as she mused, and like style’s after-body, answer held in form.