A/N: this one is for 'birds' from the february prompt list! It's a little bit experimental and different from what I usually write, so I'd especially love to hear your thoughts on it, and as always I hope you enjoy!
At the end of summer, the once-pale greens become dark and lush, though perhaps by design it happens so slowly that it is difficult to spot. When the breezes of September begin to rustle the distant tops of the trees, they are chilled ever so slightly at their fleeting edges, and on the ground the earth grows curiously cool underfoot. Minute by minute, the days are becoming shorter, but it is easy to think it a trick of the light. The pavement is still hot, the sun still beats down with a relentless heat that swims in the air, and humidity lingers in the valley; you might not notice the slipping away of summer until it falls- seemingly quite out of nowhere- into autumn.
The truth is that summer drifts away slowly, day by day by day. It falls apart one leaf at a time, tip-toeing so that you may overlook it in favor of clinging to the sunburst life of pool days and long stretches of daylight. It's a gift, given to you by the earth and her friends, wrapped neatly in a bow made of late blooming daisies and wild knockout roses. August thunderstorms are so very plentiful, so distracting with their displays of downpour and thunder, that you might not take note of what happens in the silver flash of heat lightning- but it is happening. Where the rain soaks into the ground, it cools the soil, and in the brief pauses between showers, there is a note of lower temperature, a rush of cool wind. There it is- and then gone, in an instant. You are left to wonder whether you might have imagined it. Wishful thinking, whispers a deep and hidden part of you that longs for change.
In the early stages of summer's sly transition to autumn, it is only the birds who notice. They feel it in the hollow spaces inside their bones, in the sensitive tips of their feathers, in the miniscule chambers of their tiny, fluttering hearts. So they begin to prepare. They have been privy to the gift of foresight in a way that human beings- for all of their clumsy, graceless, and heartfelt floundering, their clinging with open hearts to all that they love- have been blind to, for each summer past and each summer to come. The birds do not- and can not- close their keen eyes to the change that is pressing in on them. That is a privilege reserved only for us.
So we stumble happily through summer and don't see the end coming until it is quite too late, and one season has entirely collapsed into another.
All of the signs are there, shrouded in the thin, shimmering fabric of elusive heat. The vibrant life of summer is coming to a slow, slipping end, and it won't be long before you will wonder where it went. There will come a morning very soon. You will wake and find that it is not yet light out, and the air is crisp, and the steam from your coffee is visible suddenly, and you will reach for your socks when you slip out of your warm bed and you'll blink and think to yourself, when did this happen?
Because though you may yearn for flight, you are not a bird.
It was September sixteenth. Virginia was still blazing, a firm eighty-six degrees at the height of the day. In the relentlessly bright golden light of mid-afternoon, a faint haze of hay dust and slowly drying grass floated through the air, sparkling and spinning. Elizabeth perched on the low steps of the porch and let the sun beat down on her, squinting in the light.
Around her, everything was quiet. Maybe too quiet.
Once upon a time, this place would have been full of energy on a day like this: children shouting and playing, horses running, Henry tending to a flowerbed that he loved. She looked up; far, far above her, a flock of geese formed a perfect V and flew in formation, away from the farm, away from Virginia, on to presumably warmer and perhaps louder places.
"Hey."
Elizabeth turned, and found her husband in the doorway, the wooden-framed screen door hanging open on its hinges as he hovered, not quite in or out. A smile rose to her face, natural and unbidden, at the sight of him, like an instinct, and he smiled back.
"Hey, yourself," she said. It was a Sunday. Henry ambled leisurely over to where she was sitting, across the wooden boards of the porch, and slowly lowered himself down next to her into the sunlight that spilled over onto the steps. It didn't look difficult, exactly. It simply lacked ease, existing as they both did these days in a certain sort of limbo- neither young nor entirely old, beyond middle age but not elderly, an in-between place that was not yet difficult, but no longer effortless.
There was silence, for a moment. Then-
"Do you ever think about how birds always have somewhere to go?" Elizabeth asked. She looked over at Henry, and found a small, fond smile on his lips. He looked up at the sky, watching the way the topmost branches of their stately yellow poplar tree caught in a breeze that didn't quite reach the ground.
In truth, he had thought about it quite a bit. He strongly suspected that Elizabeth already knew as much, so he left it unsaid.
"Not all of them do," he said instead. He slowly stretched out his legs onto the step below, a little bit catlike, and looked over at her, taking in the way the sun brought out the lightest color in her blonde hair. Once, it had been mostly darker, honeyed tones of golden blonde; today, it was pale buttercup and vanilla ice cream light. The sun's rays had settled into her face as if built in and her sharp blue eyes flashed, vivid as ever, through her glasses.
Henry thought she was utterly breathtaking, and considered telling her so, but held back in favor of indulging her moment of thoughtful philosophizing.
"Some birds don't migrate at all," Henry said. "And some migrate here, this is as far south as they go. Some migrate when they're young and then just…stay where they land."
Elizabeth looked up to the sky again, and found nothing but a vast expanse of cloudless blue. There was not a single bird in sight.
She sighed and looked over at Henry instead, studying the lines of his face that were as familiar to her as her own in the mirror, or more so. The changes in herself, she might have missed or ignored on purpose. But the changes in him, however subtly or slowly they had occurred, Elizabeth had counted and treasured. Such was love, she supposed. They had simply devoted their lives to the leisurely pastime of noting the changes in each other.
Henry smiled, faint and wistful.
"What about the birds that mate for life?" he asked.
Elizabeth gave him a look that he had seen on her face so many times that it immediately conjured a long, clicking film reel of images that slipped through his memory as if on command.
"What about them?" she asked. He shrugged lightly, and looked up at the poplar tree where she had fixed her gaze before. To anyone else, it might have seemed he was trying to see whatever she had seen, to understand. But Elizabeth knew that he had already understood, and now was simply taking in the sight.
"I think it doesn't matter where they go," Henry said quietly.
He looked over at her again, and his hazel eyes were warm and inviting as ever.
"Or if they stay in the same place?" she asked.
A note of something sweet like hope or invitation floated in the space between her words, fluttering amongst the syllables.
Henry smiled, and reached out until his hand met her knee, warm and sturdy as his fingers on her had always been. His knuckles were no longer slender, but the metal of his wedding band sparkled in the sunlight like it might have been brand new. And- as always- the caged, unknown thing in Elizabeth's chest that yearned for something she could not name went still at the touch of Henry's hand.
"Maybe especially if they stay in the same place," he said.
In effortless tandem, they both looked back out at the expanse of late-summer grass before them, and as they did a breeze swept across the porch, stirring up the distant, unseen ragweed pollen that floated and swirled on the back of the cool air.
In the back of her mind, pushed away instinctively, Elizabeth might have thought it a little bit chilly.
"Come on," Henry coaxed gently, as he flipped his hand from palm-down on her knee to palm-up, offering it for her to take. "Let's get out of the heat. I was thinking about dragging out the Scrabble board."
Elizabeth paused, like she was thinking, and then raised her eyebrows at him with utter good nature.
"If you think the letters are big enough."
Henry laughed, and the sound filled her with a warmth the sun could not begin to fathom.
Then, she took his hand in hers, a homecoming in its own right. And they rose, neither quite difficult nor quite easy, but together.
The evening passed as so many others had before it, with unspoken touch and familiar voice, and the following morning, September seventeenth, dawned ever so slightly later than its predecessor.
Outside the farmhouse, the air was faintly crisp. Henry woke first, left Elizabeth sleeping peacefully, and found himself reaching for his socks to ward off the sudden chill in the hardwood floor. When he crept quietly out of the room, down the creaky stairs and into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee that would inevitably seep its aroma into the second floor and draw Elizabeth out of the bedroom, Henry noticed that the steam over his cup was starkly visible in the cool air.
And beyond the window glass, beyond the front porch, beyond the steps where he and Elizabeth had sat in the sunshine yesterday afternoon, beyond the drying grass, there was a yellow poplar tree. In its branches, high above the ground where it was notably cooler, there were two birds, whose vibrant, ruffling feathers were securely hidden amongst the dark, lush greens of the last fleeting days of summer.
On the uppermost branch, a scarlet cardinal; and two branches below, an eastern bluebird. Two little songbirds who mated for life, and had nowhere to be.