Shot in a Movie
Mid-September, during that hour when the lowering sun melts over everything like runny honey and lights the still-green trees with gold and red, opening a million lead-sized portals to the crisper future. They reflect in vertical streaks forming a crescent down the lake’s rippling surface, as if a painter had laid out the colors on the water’s edge, then taken a giant brush and smeared. Elsewhere the lake is the palest blue, the faintest yellow, always moving, currents drifting to and fro on as the water flows in and out, in and out. They cast shuddering golden reflections on the tree closest to the edge. Underneath a leafy bough sticking out over the water, a family of ducks drifts along, periodically diving for food off the bottom—rumps up, pointed wing-ends towards the sky, tails curled down, red feet kicking out to keep themselves in place. A pair dives in front of where I sit in my sturdy green adirondack on the bank. They dive, then come up, smack their bills, dive again, come up again, circle around each other as ripples radiate out from them.
Then they drift apart—one keeps diving farther up the bank, the other goes to some other ducks and seems to have a disagreement. There’s a rosy glow on the horizon. Someone is playing La Vie en Rose on the Carillon. And then the ducks are back together, heads underwater; and then the light’s fading; and there’s a cooler breeze against my bare arms; and even the green trees look a bit redder than before.
