Late summer days linger in hazy dreams before the door of autumn. In Dripping Springs town, a deep-rooted, forgotten rose bush scrapes its thorns on the peeled, white clapboard home, abandoned in someone’s childhood summer long ago.
The rotten bird house still clings crooked to a post where a bird sits slanted, gazing upon the crumbled stone markers of Pickett Cemetery; where many children went to dreaming, laughing and sleeping, in another place and time.
Wind moves through the graveyard, hoary with dry poke weed, whistling a tune that sounds like flames cracking.
The Pokeweed berries make the prettiest stains to color my faded gingham dresses. Deepest magenta stains my fingertips as I collect the ripe ones… and always more than I need, for my basket has slits in the corners. Tumbling berries leave a trail where thrashers and starlings follow me home devouring their tasty treat.
In the town meadow a decaying Dutch barn, swallowed by the thorn honey locust and oak trees, sees no one now; not even secret lovers. Haycocks of timothy and rye adorn the fields with heavy, syrupy scents of warm apple, watermelon and spiced musk.
The autumn damp, a mist of tiny crystals, settle upon hay fronds as they whisper and sway under the Hunter’s moon in undulating prayer. A Great Horned Owl from a barn rafter on high, listens as leaves crackle, eyes luminous gazing for frightened meadow voles that run to the sanctuary of forest darkness.
Another summer has come and gone. The wrathful heat stirred the soul of a million cicada, mad wasps and lightning bug jar nights, where children ran barefoot to the damp ravine for mystery treasure and creek walkin’. Soon, these moments will be replaced with apple harvesting, sweatshirt Saturdays, leaf raking, early baths and grandma’s fresh squeezed lemonade, the last batch of the season.
The transition of summer into autumn in Dripping Springs, brings townsfolk out of sun heated parlors onto cobwebbed porches, swept clean from harvest dust. The brisk evening breeze carries rich scents of cinnamon apple cider and pipe smoke from the old men who weave yarns of days gone by, to anyone who will listen; until the rocking chairs rhythm is stilled and the streets last porch light flickers and succumbs to the shadow hours.
© 2026 Tommie Flannery Baskis
