Land O’Jim

By James Reidel

During the last few days of September into the first and into the second week of October, in temperate zones, the “Indian Summer” prevails and evades any conscious effort not to speak its name. But this “sleight of season” is one we all come back to. It has fond memories. It comes with no merchandise, no uniforms, no bare knees of a cheerleader on the sidelines in her tight buckskin skirt who bared her ample breasts with that lascivious little puppet of folding the cardstock label — but there is the noble, the savage clue to its name, a coinage of the Enlightenment. You can walk about comfortably bare–chested in the weather, stark naked, and relish the unseasonable weather. Now the air does have a certain smack, a mildly astringent smell, that of fresh tar brushed on with push brooms over the better maintained driveways in the neighborhood. These lend this appearance — a great serpent with motley plumage, a thing making its way to (or from) the house, depending on the two points of view that we take in these times, whenever the wind picks up the falling leaves. Like golden scales, they drift and barrel and not a few adhere to the blacktop as it cures, making a shining path barred by spent plastic buckets, turned upside down, five–gallon bollards so as not to step, for where to stand circumspect
before all this black overpainting, seemingly hacked apart by a garden hoe, in single strokes or scattered in great letter Js, masterpiece and signature in one, wriggling in their death throes.