I’ve got seeds in my pocket and a sonata on my fingertips. It is a June evening, blushing with the colours of the sun up past its bedtime. These night hours seem stolen from some other world, some other time. There is the only the wind in the trees, and its noise does not demand, though we all bow to its power. There is no past, only these seeds that I place in the soil, space, cover up, then step to the next row. The garden gives, long before its fruits are ripe. Solitude. Solidarity with the earth and the mother spider that scuttles her egg nest to safer ground. Here is time, true and ticking, tuned to the turn of the earth and tilt of sun. Before the dark settles I put the tools in the shed and scrub the black dirt from my knuckles. Now limbered up, fingers fall easily on the smooth ivory keys, remembering patterns learned a decade and a half ago. The window is open to the night air, and I linger with the diminuendo, feeling the last vibrations sink away into the walls and floor of this old house. Then there is quiet. The quiet of children sleeping, and the breeze blowing through the rooms, and the frogs across the valley. There is a peace that comes when all the portals to the racing, rabid world are closed, and a thought can wander and turn without the clamoring opinions of a never-sleeping network. The house fills with the glow of lamps, but there is yet indigo through the windowpanes. Soon the night will leave us with only mirrors, and then what will we see gazing back at us? I have danced with June, let it in and taken its bait – and there, it smiles with me.

~lg