In The Mode Of Autumn

by Mike Mayak

I was up early that October morning in the hours after Midnight at the edge of dawn beginning to reveal itself in the sky. It was still close enough to September and warm enough to feel like a mild Summer. Indeed I had been out on my front porch the previous morning at the same time and it had been almost unseasonably warm, in the high seventies according to the old fashioned thermometer attatched to a post on the porch by the home’s previous owner.

That morning I just stood inside at the front window with my coffee, just staring out at the darkened houses in my neighborhood. Wondering if the kids asleep in the houses were dreaming about Summer and if they were glad to be back in school.

That was when I saw the man.

He was impossible to miss. He was at the end of the block, walking down the middle of the street. Swaying and dancing to an unheard rhythm. I thought something looked a little “off” in that scene, besides a guy dancing down a streetlight-lit street in the early A.M. Partly it was his clothes. Ragged, like a scarecrow. And made up of patches of fabric of a multitude of colors. Colors that were versions of dark greens and browns. His hat was coal black, like a piece of felt that had been wadded up and run over in the street. There was a tear in what passed for the brim right in front.

Then I realized the other odd thing; as he danced past the individual yards the tree leaves faded from green to orange and red in the dim light and the grass on the ground went brown. The colors of Autum, dim but visible in the streetlight.

The man passed for a moment as he came alongside the Rutger’s house. One of the houses on the block that had a front porch, an elevated concrete slab that stretched from the driveway past their big front window. The man spun, pirouetted in the street, one arm extended and stopped, his arm pointed at the porch. In another instant, the porch was decorated with pumpkins and black and orange streamers hanging from the support posts.

And that was the way it went. He danced and the landscape of the neighborhood changed from Summer to Autumn as he passed. I was enjoying the spectacle, even as I was sure I was dreaming that I had fallen into a children’s seasonal picture book. I had no lights on in the house but in the dimness I could read the old thermometer on my porch and clearly see that the temperature had dropped about ten degrees in the last few moments as I was watching the transformation.

Then the man danced in front of my house, saw me in the window and stopped. His mouth first registering surprise and then a broad grin. He took off his hat and bowed, looked behind me and spun around several times coming to rest on one knee, facing the house across the street one arm pointing upward at the orange, not-quite-full setting Moon which was positioned in the sky like it had landed on the neighbor’s roof.

In another instant, the orange Moon had a jagged black smile and two black triangles for eyes. Just like a Jack O’Lantern in the early morning sky.

I was smiling myself as I viewed the phenomenon. I glanced down at the street and the man was gone. The Moon had returned to normal and the man was gone. I glanced down the street; the porches were empty of pumpkins, the trees and yards still had their deceptive October late Summer greenery. But on the porch, the dial on my thermometer was slowly edging back up into the seventies.

I went back to bed. But in the next week, the leaves turned and the neighbors decorated their porches the way I had seen that early morning.

And the Jack O’Lantern Moon soared through my dreams.

—end—

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The title “In The Mode Of Autumn,” was part of a group poem Sister Madeline Kisner coaxed out of us on a walk along the Arkansas River at this time of year either my first or second year in College. (About ‘78 or ‘79.) I do not remember who came up with the line. It might even have been me. —–mike