The fleeting evenings

I hold a fear, the worst kind, the one in which I'm recognizing an inevitable truth and fretting on it anyway, one years off and yet it bothers me, one that is so unexceptional and declining and trite; not a fear of getting old, exactly, as if that isn't banal enough. I fear the day when I'm a little old lady who has to wear turtleneck sweaters in the summer. When I get cold I can't get warm and winters make me cranky and I've always understood "cold in my bones" not as a phrase but a state of being and every year it becomes more acute.

And I really loathe turtleneck sweaters, you guys. They make my neck claustrophobic. But I am going to have hoods and shawls and scarves. And by that list I mean: I will have them all at once upon me. And still I will be cold; and I'll look back on my 30s when I didn't know how not-yet-cold I was.

So the girls were choreographing a show yesterday. They were on the front lawn. L was wearing just her underpants at just the last season, maybe, where it's (allegedly) warm enough outside to do so and she's childlishly immodest enough to do so. E was in a tank top and shorts. There was one star in the sky, then two, and to the left the air was fuzzy gray and cobalt and to the right, just over the neighbors' oak, the blues dropped into fuchsia and clementine and gold. We always get the best sunsets just over the across-the-street house lines, just out of perfect sight. They make me want to climb on the roof, every time.

E had a baton with sparkly streamers that she got at the circus ages ago and L had a baton made out of two paper towel rolls, one wedged into the other for length and gravitas. And the show was long, which is all the things childhood should be, because they'd spent forever outside choreographing, outdoors and free play and imaginative reuse and rhythm and math and whimsy and creative spirit. And they wanted me to watch their show. And I barely could, because I don't know if you know this, but it's late October and the sun was running away. I was cold.

So one brought me the stool out of the bathroom that they climb on to reach the faucets and spared me the concrete stoop or cool grass. And one brought me my sweater, draped over the newel post. And I carried out my mug of tea and huddled in the shawl of my collar, foreshadowing the pitiful shrunken shivering creature I'll one day be.

The show was like most of their shows, a capella humming and some combination of gymnastics, silliness, very measured turn-taking, and improvisation. It was nearly too dark to see and a third star came out, a fourth and a fifth. And I was so cold and getting colder. But they weren't, they were joie-de-vivreing, you know, gloriously yawping with discards salvaged from the recycle bin, and soon it will be too cold outside even for them.

And I'll do anything to stave off winter so I sat and beamed and clapped and smiled, for the show and its encore and its other encore, because they still felt the zest of everything.