And you in your autumn sweater

I'm obsessed with blankets.

Last night, I texted The Husband: I'll be in the bedroom when you get home. Underneath all the blankets I could find in the house. And that's where he found me when he got home. Like camping.

I can't stop visiting this page. I ordered a linen/cotton throw with the excitement of someone ordering plane tickets for a month-long vacation. I will have a vacation in my bed, underneath a blanket. Underneath piles of blankets.

It's this premature autumn we're having. This grey sky tease.

I want to read campus novels, The Secret History, Pnin. Or isolate myself with Walden and Robert Frost. I'm suddenly highly envious of those in academia, those who will watch the leaves turn over old stone and brick, slanted walkways and students reading beneath trees. I want to move temporarily to Vermont, to plan trips to see covered bridges and upstate farms. I seek photographs that make use of soft light, trees, and warm drinks. My hands are in my pockets.

Soon everyone will begin to mention sweaters, leaves, hot cider. I want to add: jam jars, anxious branches, the sound of owls replacing crickets, NPR, splinters in barn doors, earth tones in the wardrobe and on the cover of The New Yorker, potatoes boiling in a pot on the stove. My soundtrack: Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels). Joni Mitchell. Don't Go Back To Rockville. Yo La Tengo.

Blankets. And the word "brisk."

The Husband says not to wish the summer away. It is, after all, still the middle of August. So I wait patiently, but with one finger tapping, a chill in the small of my back, for my blanket to arrive, for apples to ripen and hay to dry out, for the coats of horses to thicken...

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.