Waning summer

 Went for a walk today around the neighborhood, and not long into it something both seen and unseen fell into step beside me.

It was the slow fade of summer, keeping its dwindling time.

You saw it first in the autumnal blue sky, and felt it in the sun on your neck, more like a warm hand than the blowtorch sear of a few short weeks ago. A shirt-ruffling breeze kicked up, and if it was  mostly benign you could smell a hint of September on its breath.

Pretty soon I started to notice other things, too -- small hints, if you will, that the season was almost imperceptibly loosening its grip.

The quiet, for starters, now that all the kids are back in the slammer -- oops, back in school -- again.

Bright orange peaking through the vines of a pumpkin patch, fat ripe jack-o-lanterns-to-be mixed in with four or five laggards that stubbornly clung to their August green.

Splashes of color in potted plants on people's decks and porches, summer flora hanging tight to the last of its glory.

Underneath the trees, your feet crunched the shells of nuts stripped of their meat by industrious squirrels. The breeze kicked up again, and the leaves made an elderly dry-bones clatter markedly different from the whispering rustle of June's adolescents.

A bit farther along, the community pool was deserted, and down by the elementary school so were the two Wildcat baseball diamonds. Clumps of grass were beginning to reclaim the beige infield where, two months ago, pint-sized fielders sent their keening battle cry -- Hey-battah, hey-battah, hey-battah SWING! -- up to the warm summer sky.

Now it was as silent, and empty, as everywhere else.  Though I walked for more than an hour, I never saw another soul.

But I did see something else at one point.

Down past the golf course, around a bend, and I was back under the trees again, where something briefly brought me up short. Here in the path lays a renegade branch, leaves all wither-y, presumably separated from its brethren by a rogue gust of wind. Attached to it was a single acorn, the only one I've seen -- or at least noticed -- on this lovely morning

What I noticed about this one was it wasn't  brown, like the acorns to come in September and October. It was still green.

Summer, God love it. Still hangin' on.