Thanks to global warming, November is the “new September” in New York City, which makes it an ideal time to visit the grounds of the Morris-Jumel mansion.
As usual, it was overrun with ghosts.
I wondered if I should reconsider my stance against hydrangeas, whose wilting flowers added an undeniable element of decaying elegance to the garden. On the other hand, I’m not sure I could suffer through the relentless summer cheer to get to this point.
In today’s fast-moving news world, I feel like more articles could be written about the perfect russet color of autumn oak leaves.
Winter roses also have appeal, even when they’re pink. I thought about an exciting message I had received in a fortune cookie the night before: it said, “Dreams are stars in the sky of your destiny,” which made me hope that my astrological purgatory — predicted in 2011 by a friend who said it would last at least six years — would soon be over.
I made my first new year’s resolution: henceforth, I would only communicate with shadows, light, and stone. For example: I knew that it was 2:10 in the afternoon without even looking at my cell phone.
I also counted 1784 dahlia petals without using my “flower-petal counting” app. (I think these are dahlias?)
From my office building window, I sent hand signals to everyone else in downtown Manhattan.
Zephyr: Who’s that idiot jumping up and down in the window?
Dante: Lol.
Elektra convened a summit of elders on the window sill.
Clio arrived after the meeting was already over.
The Japanese maple was the star of the late-November garden.
If we had ten of them and they were all hundreds of years old, living on an island in a lake on the outskirts of Tokyo, it would be like a scene from a Mishima novel.
There would have to be waterfalls, too, whose quiet, running waters would fill us with melancholy as we considered the passage of time.
It was also beginning to seem like December would be a horrible month for television. All of our favorite shows were about to end, and everything else was unwatchable. Fortunately, there was a new batch of books and movies whose themes were very relevant to the life of non-heterosexual, middle-aged office worker.
Here’s a still from one new show: it’s called “Shades of Yellow, Shades of Green” and nine episodes of Season One were just “picked up” after a pilot performed “incredibly well” among the aforementioned demographic. I was excited!
Or if that show turned out to be from “direct from Yawnsville,” we could always entertain ourselves with light and shadows, just as we had always done.
Or by watching the yellow birch leaves fall silently to the ground, a harbinger of the coming snows.
