Waiting

while waiting

I sit on the porch with the dogs gazing over the drying bean field as dragonflies dance in the sun. It’s hot, but with September comes the promise of cool, damp evenings and a respite from sweat.

Along my road, a looming stand of hedge trees towers overhead, their gnarled trunks looking like creatures in suspended animation, watchers out of a Tolkien novel. They possess an ancient bearing planted an unfathomable age ago to have reached such forbidding height and countenance.

This time of year, they’re dropping their “apples” those green brainy-looking fruits sometimes called Osage oranges or hedge balls. They’re supposed to repel bugs when you place them around your home’s foundation.

Passersby, toodling about in their side-by-sides, a common sight on gravel roads these days, stop to pick up the ones that fall by the way.

On the porch, the dogs sit at my feet waiting. They crouch with the vigilance of sentries who’ve forgotten what war is, but remember it could happen at any moment. So it goes when an apple lets loose of its moorings and plummets through leaves and branches, a grenade hurtling towards the ground from 80 or so feet, impacting the earth with the force of a gunshot. Every time it startles me. It startles the dogs. And every time they give chase. They’ll never learn it’s not a deer, and I suppose I’ll never stop believing the next season will be gentler than the last. Some lessons aren’t meant to stick.

Once their investigation is complete, they amble back to the porch to resume our peaceable existence, back to waiting for the next opportunity to pull a trigger on the fantasy of the chance to be a hero.

We sit, with winter headed our way, the three of us, pretending to be hunters of great consequence, when in truth we’re just waiting on the fruit to fall.