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 birds sit slanted gazing upon the crumbled stone graves of Pickett Cemetery; where many children went to dreaming, laughing and sleeping, in another place and time.

Wind moves through the cemetery, 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.

In the town meadow a decaying Dutch barn, swallowed by the Honey thorn 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 that stirred the soul of a million cicada, mad wasps and lightning bug jar nights where children ran barefoot into cool ravines for mystery treasure and creek walkin’ are to be replaced with porch swing evenings, early baths and grandma’s last fresh lemonade of the season.

The transition of summer into autumn in our town brings neighbors 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 a yarn of days gone, to anyone who will listen, late into the night; until the last porch light flickers and succumbs to the dark hours.

© 2026 Tommie Flannery Baskis