The signs are all there: big puffy coats of down in department stores, boots standing ready for feet and shovels and salt on center stage in the garage area. We condo dwellers do not shovel. We pay to have others shovel. We pay to have our windows washed twice yearly, which is one wash too many. The condo board makes those kinds of decisions. If you live in a condo, you bow to the wishes of the elected leaders. You have to hand it to anyone who serves on a condo board. It’s a brutal life consisting of nasty notes slipped under your door, snide snarls in the elevator, and all manner of disrespect. Skin that will bounce bullets is the skin that all board members must have.
This image is of a rope anchored to my north-facing balcony. It keeps the window washers from spinning off into space as they wash the multiple panes one more time before the snow flies. I know of owners who stand on the interior side of the panes and when the washer arrives at their exterior window, said owners point out a spot or two they missed. Can you believe it? Was I ever that crazy? This is as nutty as demanding matching roses on our terrace.
I say farewell to summer by preparing for the onslaught of storms that rip in from Canada, for instance, the dreaded “Alberta Clipper” that excites the television weatherpersons and causes the vertical posts on my balcony railing to hum like harps from Hell. The lake beyond the balcony whips into a watery froth, aiming blows at the few remaining boats anchored at McKinley Marina. My 50’s era turquoise patio furniture goes into hiding, my plants seek shelter in the kitchen, and a five-year-old white moth orchid (so splendid from May to November), has shed all but one opulent blossom. The angle of the sun adjusts itself and the building’s shadows stretch ever longer. When I rise in the morning, it’s dark, but I do not dress by yellow candlelight.
Out come the blankets of 100% wool. Closer creeps my chair to the gas log fireplace. While flocks of snowbirds with their terminally tanned faces exit the building, bound for Florida and Arizona, I stay behind with the seagulls and snowplows, thinking of the days when I skied at Little Switzerland, zooming down icy hills like a fool. You have to be a fool to ski in Wisconsin. There was a time when I was a fool.
Out come the books. Below me is a condo library where people can seek out the reading tastes of others. It was a great day when I discovered someone else in the building admires the diverse writings of Joyce Carol Oates, a UW-Madison grad who is now an esteemed professor at Princeton. I met her once when Schwartz Books was on Downer. I think she was promoting Zombie, the tale of Jeffrey Dahmer, a genuine serial killer who lived in Milwaukee and devoured his victims. I asked her why it was that her novels and those of John Irving and John Updike, each mention a dressmaker’s dummy somewhere in the text. Without batting an eye, the Joyce known as Oates, chirped, “Oh, I’ve never read Irving or Updike.”
Near my chair is Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. My son introduced me to him via Dandelion Wine and in turn I gifted him with Farewell Summer (www.harpercollins.com) for his 46th birthday. It’s a tale told well about the summer of 1928, experienced through the senses of a twelve-year-old-boy in Green Town, Illinois, a fictional place based on Bradbury’s real hometown of Waukegan, Illinois, a stone’s throw south of Milwaukee.
Within the 200 plus pages are conflicts twixt the young and elderly as the boy moves toward manhood. Like the clock in the town square, the plot chimes a specific place and time. Wrapped in my down robe, I move ever closer to the gas log, imagining the young Bradbury entering his grandpa’s library, a space the boy describes thusly:….”It was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.”
In October the couple down the hall welcomed a 9lb. baby boy…their third child since I moved in six years ago. I like to hear the kids screaming and playing up and down our hallway, but come spring they’ll move into a huge lakeshore home north of here. They will be missed. Another resident has fled for his Florida condo, and my immediate neighbor, a notable old Packer, rarely visits his unit these days. I’m quite often, at least in the winter, the only resident on this floor. Should I expire in bed, well, who would know?
I’ll be damned if I’ll wear that Life Alert thingy.
The cover of Farewell Summer depicts an hour glass encasing a dandelion puffed in white. Farewell summer. Hello darkness my old friend. My clock has been set back one hour.
