Notes From Madoo

ROBERT DASH

Late summer was always full of evening. Gleaming things. Whites. Panamas, boaters, shuttlecock on the gravel. "Did you bring the racquets in?"

Runny glass pitchers with a few last ice cubes. Lemonade. Southsides.

"I'd cover the boat. There's heavy dew."

A few whispers. Lights go on in the dining room. There is the sound of crockery and silver. In the dusk, whites of phlox, garlic chives, Abyssinian gladiolas; perennials, bulbs, corms. All sweet. Almost honeyed.

We never let the seeds of the chives ripen and fall after the summer we had found garlic chive paths and little garlic chive lawns. Phlox were divided every two or three years. A white, marmoreal, nameless phlox I have now, mildew-proof and of lengthy bloom. The Abyssinian gladiolas (acidanthera) so cheap then (and now) we never bothered lifting and storing them. Aloof borders. A bit impeccable.

From the windows of the dining room we heard the creak of a boat and a great ghost of a sail shifting and then gone in the dark of the lake. The commingled odors of phlox, acidanthera, and chives swept into the room.

When a season is ending, drawing to a close, one bends into each moment, holding each close, drawing or is it pulling at each satisfaction, trying to make it stall, to make it last and last. One leans into moments as if they could be bagged and mounted like some Victorian trophy over a fireplace. Or are they the glass given to the dying in a search for a breath of moisture, a brio of damp as cool as any ade to the throat? And then the sail passed again.

"I wonder whose boat?"

"It seems quite large."

Whites again. Shoes, ribbons, flannels, an old parasol. All of those white gloves, jackets, and scarves. Acidanthera, phlox, garlic chives. The cotton top of the badminton net, the net shining with dew. Dew on croquet mallets and balls and all of the little hoops. Lights on the porch where moths fluttered on the screens.

"Is the dog in?"

A bark.

"At the kitchen door. There you are. Here's a bone."

Something moves down the hill. A deer, perhaps. The dog chuffs once and returns to his gnawing. Between the twin docks, the boat under its cover rocks gently. And a squat black stain clambers up from the logs and ambles toward a nightly feast of zinnias. The muskrat. Year after year it would decimate them, felling them like timber. The same muskrat? I once saw it, dozing in the sun on this bicycle catamaran.

However briefly they shine, old memories are awesome, as bright and visible as the headlong of a falling star.

I think I will try allium in a pot this winter, the leaves are finest choice for a salad, or sprinkled on a fish, or above sweet butter on a slice of rye. Allium, they say, is ancient Latin for garlic. It too a memory. A talking in shadows, time into time.

Dinner over, napkins slipped back into rings, we stepped outside to watch the moon rise over Sterling Forest and spread on the lake.

"I don't see that boat. Anywhere."

We strolled in the garden between oaks and swamp maples, chastened.

Bats swooped out from the upstairs shutters and, in the distance, across the lake, an owl.

And the odors of phlox, acidanthera, and chives swept in through the windows as we, a family, finally slept.