scanning the plot

(little melancholy sniff as the last hours of summer drift away.  But it's been a lovely one--the first true summer off [if you discount the stress of a do-it-yourself-cross-country move-to-a-new-city/community] that I've had in several years.  And it's been good.)  Here's to a new school year and here's to keeping a bit of the azure sun-struckness.  Some days the pond wears a glaze of yellow pollen. Some days it is clean-swept. The trout leap up, feasting on insects. A modest size, it sits like a soup tureen in a surround of white pine where Rosie, 14 lbs., some sort of rescued terrier, part bat (the ears), part anteater (the nose), shyly paddles in the shallows for salamanders, frogs and little painted turtles. She logged ten years down south in a kennel, secured in a crate at night. Her heart murmur will carry her off, no one can say when. Meanwhile she is rapt in the moment, our hearts leap up observing. Dogs live in the moment, pursuing that brilliant dragonfly called pleasure. Only we, sunstruck in this azure day, must drag along the backpacks of our past, must peer into the bottom muck of what's to come, scanning the plot for words that say another year, or not. "In the Moment" by Maxine Kumin, from Where I Live. © Norton, 2012.