summertime

A Poem by just Jake

It’s summertime. The days are long and the weather is warm. It is the time of year that I long for, my favorite season- summertime.

This is the time of year when there is no shortage of activity. Whether it is work or fun, the long days and the warm nights make anything seem possible. I plan vacations, projects at home, and short trips out to see friends. And some of it actually happens.

It’s about midnight on a Sunday in late June. I just walked my puppy. The northeast Ohio night air is cool and damp. The sky is black and crisp. The stars twinkle white and blue. Large commercial jet airliners pass by silently at forty thousand feet, only detectable by the pulsing red lights on their wingtips. From east to west or south to north they make criss-crossing lines in the Ohio sky. I wonder where they are going- northwest to Detroit? Due west to Chicago? Maybe. I use to dream of flying those jets. How cool would that have been? Always on my way somewhere, quietly slipping over one town and then on to the next. That’s a dream that was not meant to be. But it is summertime.

The grass is drenched by the evening dew and the moon is apparently taking the night off. The trees are heavy with fruit. Cherries, apples, mulberries and crabapples abound- both in the trees and on the ground. If you are still and patient, you can hear the occasional dropping apple. I don’t know what causes them to drop. But you can hear it snap from its stem and skitter through the leaves and branches, before hitting the ground with a thud. It is summertime.

It is still a bit early for grapes and raspberries and blueberries. But the flowers are working on their second set of blooms. Ground hogs, chipmunks, squirrels, bunnies, opossums, raccoons, skunks, moles, and countless varieties of birds are all eating good and getting fat. It has been four weeks since my last chemo injection, so I am too. AND it’s summertime.