I waited all summer for these asters to bloom. The green of it just grew and grew, sprawling across the flowerbed, crowding out the competition, but never any buds. Finally, last week, they busted out. Now I'll have November flowers. The literal late-bloomer wins again. They glow in the dim light of this latest gloom, the dark damp that will, most probably, be with us for the next few months.

Time to get some work done. Head down against the rain. Eyes open and undazzled.

It's been a while since I've posted any cat pictures here, so indulge me, please. This is what we do, Mao and I. We find a spot of sun, grow sleepy in it, but not so sleepy that we can't keep on eye on things – A vary wary eye on the world, it's people and their inability to provide the proper amount of treats.

You'll be driving along depressed when suddenly
a cloud will move and the sun will muscle through
and ignite the hills. It may not last. Probably
won't last. But for a moment the whole world
comes to. Wakes up. Proves it lives. It lives—
red, yellow, orange, brown, russet, ocher, vermilion,
gold. Flame and rust. Flame and rust, the permutations
of burning. You're on fire. Your eyes are on fire.
It won't last, you don't want it to last. You
can't stand any more. But you don't want it to stop.
It's what you've come for. It's what you'll
come back for. It won't stay with you, but you'll
remember that it felt like nothing else you've felt
or something you've felt that also didn't last.

from Leaves, by Lloyd Schwartz

I haven't checked the DSM-IV, but I think someone should look into this condition I've developed. It starts with a mild curiosity about people I've lost touch with and snowballs into a pathological obsession to share my most embarrassing photos of myself. This one makes me laugh so hard I almost cry. 1985, 9th grade graduation dance. See? Why do you need to see this? Why do I need to show you?

Fall does this to me. I get nostalgic, though my youth was so angst-ridden that I can't reflect fondly on it. I have to simply reflect. That and join Facebook. Such a funny phenomenon. I got sukered into it because the photos of the people I wanted to stalk were too small to see without "becoming friends" with them. Over the last few days I've gotten in touch with people I haven't seen or spoken to in 20 years.

I'm not sure why this is satisfying since I was barely in touch with them while we were walking the same halls and sitting beside each other in English. But there you go. Saying hello, I remember you, gives a small, gentle tug of kindness. It's a nice reminder that despite the angst, we made it through. We can spy a bit on each others lives and imagine the other paths we might have taken. We can celebrate the roads were on.

Thankfully, my condition does not extend into a need to attend my 20th high school reunion happening in a month or so. If I start making plans for this and report them here, please, send a professional. I'll be needing some serious help.

Here are a few things I haven't killed. One I tortured with, apparently, insufficient amounts of water all summer. The other I'd written off as a boring old sprig of grass that neither grew nor blossomed, that is, until this week. And so ends another lesson: Be patient. Be generous. Rewards will follow.

Also, if you stare at your garden close enough and long enough the death knell of the empire dampens to a tolerable if not exactly soothing level. Try it.

It can be hard to motivate to walk along the beach when the beach is sitting in your front yard. With my long streak of outstanding Manzanita weather still intact, we gathered on the porch and watched the water from a close but comfortable distance. The radio never came on. The football game ran on mute. The sun, food and fine beverages gave us all a healthy glow.

You can feel it can't you? The need to escape. Wouldn't I love to hole up in a cabin in the woods. Or flee to a heat-soaked beach. What about that trip to Barcelona? Or the one to see my distant, but delightful Italian cousins?

Of course, I can barely manage the trip to the Oregon coast we'll be taking in a few days, but the balm I know it will provide is invaluable. There is little that a view of the ocean and a good book can't soothe.

Back in the warm July air, flames weren't really required, but who camps without making a fire? Maybe most grown adults are uninterested in glow sticks, but who wouldn't enjoy watching their friends fumble around in the dark with fairground toys tied to the ends of rope? Some of us needed a little bit of beauty and some needed to hold off the wide silence of the forest with the sound of crackling wood and laughter.

I don't have glow sticks or a fireplace these days so I'll have to find other distractions from the scary things lurking inside my silent radio and dark TV. I think it just started to rain again. I think that will do.

Thirty-eight today, though, in my mind I've been thirty-eight since the start of the year. 2008? 38. 2009? 39. Born in 1970, I've always clung to the simple math of year and age without the subtlety of month or day. This produces a predictably anti-climactic celebration every year. Oh well. Anyone who knows me well knows that no matter what my number, I am always old at heart.

So this is it: Garden dirt clings to my arches and the chipped paint of my nails. The sun becomes precious, each hour of it a gift, as a long column of cartoon rainclouds appear in the forecast. I see ahead of me a year of increasing solitude and silence, not shutting the world out but hiding inside it without fuss or fanfare.

I realize that Google's "street view" maps have probably been up and running for a while now, but I didn't know the full extent to which they'd mapped out my childhood and my dreams. This is where I lived from third to sixth grade. With Google's help I can now click down my route to school. I can check in at my friends houses and the scary gated mansion that I used to babysit at. I can follow the route through the bird sanctuary, around the corner and up the hill that still appears in my nightmares now and then.

I find this whole thing both fascinating and disturbing. As I clicked my way past my old church and into the shopping area (remember the day I fell along that route...I can still see the scar), I came across one image that showed a whole family getting on their bikes in their driveway. They will now be forever imprinted in this virtual map. And for some reason I feel this irrational urge to save them from such a fate, as if I could enter this space in some real way and warn them to stay inside.

In mid-summer, the squash hadn't started devouring the yard, the flowers had yet to unfold. Those tomatoes were still green and tight to the vine, but there was life there, no doubt. And yes, that blue string in the foreground is attached to a barely visible but reliably mischievous cat at the edge of the gravel.

The backyard haven has not fully materialized. These things take time and more effort than my writerly ways usually allow. In the long-shot above it doesn't look like much, but let's consider where we started and appreciate the progress that we've made.

Cherry Tomatoes
by Sandra Beasley
Little bastards of vine. Little demons by the pint. Red eggs that never hatch, just collapse and rot. When my mom told me to gather their grubby bodies into my skirt, I'd cry. You and your father, she'd chide— the way, each time I kicked and wailed against sailing, my dad shook his head, said You and your mother. Now, a city girl, I ease one loose from its siblings, from its clear plastic coffin, place it on my tongue. Just to try. The smooth surface resists, resists, and erupts in my mouth: seeds, juice, acid, blood of a perfect household. The way, when I finally went sailing, my stomach was rocked from inside out. Little boat, big sea. Handful of skinned sunsets.

The party girl across the street was sitting on her front steps this morning from about 5am to 7am crying out every ten minutes for her lost dog, more a grief-stricken moan than a real attempt to call the dog back.

The sky this morning is a thick, solid gray.

Sometimes you round a corner and everything has changed.

Inside city limits, I think there's almost nothing better on a late summer day than reading stretched out on a quiet bit of dappled grass (these days its my regular re-reading of Mrs. Dalloway). I have two big, gorgeous parks within walking distance of my house and probably half a dozen smaller ones, but I think almost any bit of cool grass or well-worn bench would do as long as it was relatively quiet. I guess that's the tricky part. Silence and city are so rarely good companions. Still, it's worth seeking out to find those few moments of perfect language in perfect light.

I'm turning the news off for a little bit, otherwise I might go mad. I already feel the threads of misanthropy spooling around my brain. It's not good. I don't think I can be a good a writer and a misanthrope at the same time. I don't want to have to choose between the two. For at least a few days, I'll shut down input from the outside world and try to focus on the good, close things.

Walking down to the Willamette on the east side is always a joy. I like the roughness of it, the mild stink of it and the maze of metal and concrete. I like a small wooden boat called Hope tied up on the pier. Late summer in our pretty city is a good, close thing.

I love that I live in the land of mimosa trees, not just mimosa cocktails. At the end of summer these trees explode in soft pink tufts, filling the branches with faint sweetness and covering the ground with a mess of fallen blossoms.

I remind myself to admire the shadows now while they are still shadows, a contrast instead of a constant. Soon enough the rippled glass will seem solid and the sill will be lost in the flat grayness of the day. Flat and gray has its advantages, of course, but now, as the days burn themselves out it's good to feel the glare and the comfort of shade.

A new garden brings new creatures. Hummingbirds, dragonflies and praying mantis. It's nice to know that such strange beings still exist in an urban setting, their wildness broken up into backyard plots and parking strips.

We curl beneath the mossy umbrella of the forest where mushrooms climb trees and salamanders climb hillsides. We breath an extra inch of air into our lungs. If this is why you go into the woods, then don't camp on the weekends. It seems that, on the weekends, at least some people stake their claim along the river and beneath the trees to recreate campsite-sized dive bars as if the beauty around them were superfluous. This weekend at Nehalem Falls there were more cackling hags than I've heard all summer in my bar-soaked neighborhood. But still, they couldn't destroy the hushed thrill of waking up to the sound of rivers and birds.