inaudibly in thought

Long ago in the 1950's in the land of the northeast Bronx, we repeatedly referred to autumn as Indian Summer. It was generally mild with warm days and flowers that bloomed until November's winds blew leaves off trees and the first frosts came. It was when old Italian men wearing hats and handknit gray cardigan sweaters wrapped their backyard fig trees in burlap and canvas. It was when my mother, in her pink cardigan sweater and white cotton socks, went into the backyard with scissors in her apron pocket and snipped the last flowers, the final basil, and maybe one more hidden and sheltered red rose. It was when the aunts came over on weekends with the uncles for coffee and pastries and went home with gigantic bouquets of chrysanthemums to brighten up city apartments.

It's Indian Summer here now and today I bought a pot of coppery chrysanthemums. Their pungent scent and familiar color beamed me into another time and place.

A white picket fence ran along the length of the wedge-shaped city lot where my father built our two-story brick house. It separated us from a vacant field behind which were a couple of acres of old oak woods. Behind the woods, a two-car subway train passed regularly on its way to the last stop. Going in the other direction it picked up cars (how? where?) and trundled to Grand Central Station. The first summer in the house, my mother Elvira, a 46 year old lifetime city dweller, suddenly became a gardener. In a few years the weedy backyard became a garden with iris-lined pathways, azaleas, roses, plum trees, cosmos, dogwood, marigolds. In late autumn she filled her apron pockets with dead flower heads, ruthlessly cut down the dried stalks, left them for my father to burn with the piles of leaves he'd raked.

Elvira dried the flower seeds over the winter and planted them in spring alongside the new shoots. As a result, the entire length of the fence was thick with tall chrysanthemums in all their colors. Inside the house she kept vases, empty mayonnaise jars and water glasses filled with them. Flowers weren't allowed in the bedrooms because she believed, as did others in her circle of immigrant and first generation Italian-American housewives, that flowers and plants in bedrooms took oxygen away from sleeping humans.

the fall
The woods are long gone. The year my parents died (more than four decades after the first tentative backyard garden), all the trees were cut down by a developer to make way for a densely populated condo community. Not a sapling was left standing.  The house was sold before construction began and I haven't been back since. I remember the woods I explored as a child and the pungent smell of untold numbers of chrysanthemums in Indian Summer. Nothing has changed.

And so on into winter
Till even I have ceased
To come as a foot printer,
And ony some slight beast
So mousy or so foxy
Shall print there as my proxy.
        (Robert Frost, last stanza, "Closed for Good")