October

you shall receive

  She woke up and checked the weather app on her phone. No rain predictions for the next ten days - the same as yesterday, the same as a month before.

  She wiggled her way out of rough  linen sheets and walked to the window. Sun had risen from behind an old oak tree and chickens were clucking in their soft morning voices. She knew it’s going to get hot soon so she pulled the window shut. 

  She made her bed, pulling linen sheets taut, fluffing up pillows, and crowning it with antique needlepoint with some exotic bird on it. She loved her room tidy, like she imagined a nun cell would be in a convent. It was a small room under the dormers, and it had a bed, small desk with a deep burn mark in it, and bookshelves with gardening books and decades worth of Vogue magazines. White painted walls were hung with antique icons, and gilded saints were looking at her solemnly and with a hint of sympathetic pity. She grabbed her robe off the foot of her bed and put it on. 

She went down to the kitchen and made her first tea of the day, and a butter and cheese sandwich. She ate her breakfast standing in front of bay window, watching squirrels playing in the yard. One had a walnut as big as its head and was digging a hole in a cast iron pot by the back door to bury it. Every spring she had a small grove of walnut trees sprouting in every pot, and the garden was full of them too. Any other time she would open window and yell, and save poor geranium in a pot, but it was mid-October, and there had been no rains since July, and it was that time in the gardening season when she was ready to let go.  

  Almost ready. She put her garden hat on and headed to her cutting garden where everything was almost dead except mums that were getting fatter and fatter flower buds and were now showing little color at the bud tips. She didn’t want it to end without seeing mums in bloom.  She looked hopelessly at the sky. Clear, with the sun now almost above her. She grabbed the watering wand and turned spigot on. 

  She gave mums a good soak, and to a few surviving dahlias, and roses that still had some blooms on them. They were underplanded with thyme, and thyme spilled onto garden walks and paths, and as she was walking on it the scent was rising in fast warming air. She always planted thyme in a garden to honor her childhood in old Ukrainian mountains with gentle chalky slopes that grew nothing but thyme and “old man’s beard” - a grass that looked like long strings of silver hair. 

  She closed the garden gate to keep deer out and looked up again. There was a white cloud in the sky now, not very big, it was glowing happily in a bright sun. “Why won't you manage some rain so everything would stop dying?” she asked bitterly and headed to the chicken coop to get eggs. Chickens needed food too, and she spent some time refilling feeders and cleaning water bowls.  The oldest and most tame hen came to talk to her and pecked at her flip flop, and she gave her some dried worms out of the bag from the shelf by the door.  The rest of hens wanted worms too and it got loud and few feathers were lost. She laughed and shook the rest of the bag onto the ground for them. With eggs in a boat of her folded palms she was almost to the house when she realized the light had changed. She looked up and a sudden wind caught her hat and tore it off her head the moment before the wall of rain hit her.