Yesterday burst into a late Indian summer, the early morning balmy, the air alive with the scent of thawing frost. A day like that stretches on and on. Working in the library, I propped the door open, and a little girl went in and out, her small hand outstretched, patiently waiting for tiny blue flies to land on her fingers. The flies had a scruffy bit like a seed carrier. Waiting for her father, she stapled together a book of colored paper, and wrote a story about a rabbit and her fly friends.

As the dusk descended, in a gorgeously gradual fall twilight, my daughter and her friends played outside, pumping on swings beneath a crescent moon and single twinkling star that gleamed with a faint amber hue. A teacher worked late in the school garden, the long strips of dark earth tilled up, sweet rich soil for garlic, my most favorite of the garden’s savoriness.

Today, those tiny blue flies have vanished. Here but for a single day, they filled our world with a snow globe variation of Indian summer, a reminder of unexpected good things.

Here’s one sentence from what I read this morning:

… from the palm of her hand against the palm of his, from their fingers locked together, and from her wrist across his wrist something came from her hand, her fingers and her wrist to his that was as fresh as the first light air that moving toward you over the sea barely wrinkles the glassy surface of a calm, a light as a feather moved across one’s lip, or a leaf falling when there is no breeze; so light that it could be felt with the touch of their fingers alone, but that was so strengthened, so intensified, and made so urgent, so aching and so strong by the hard pressure of their fingers and the close pressed palm and wrist, that it was as though a current moved up  his arm and filled his whole body with an aching hollowness of wanting.

– Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls