When He gives us eyes to see, we see clearly.

This morning it was hot again, but not far off is a change. Seasons are for reasons beyond science. Yesterday we stepped out into the heat, mid-afternoon, and the city was abandoned a (holiday, they say,) and we walked up northwards past the taphouse (quiet now, and sad,) and near along the walk here, between the sidewalk and the road, the purslane grows thick and succulent. It’s edible and delicious, you know? And later, over on Center, up by the Courthouse, we see the goat head grasses, they come up too. Right through the sidewalk. It’s the time of year when both kinds grow right here in the city. Up through the cement and pavement. In the cracks.

Not far off is a change.

I remember how autumn came one year first in a rainstorm that blew in unexpectedly, and summer had dragged on forever, and that’s all people could talk about. I remember how I watched the storm as it came rolling towards me in its loving violence, and how the poetry of it tumbled forth in the lightning and the thunder which together growled and grew in intensity, and then there was a burst of impossibly cool air, bracing and chilly, sucked in towards the storm from the highest altitude up near outer space, and the temperature dropped maybe forty degrees, and me without a coat. I shivered from the instant chill, and then my father called for me to close the door and to come inside, and not long after, everyone—the whole family—ran into an inner room (the safest room, right?) even though I wanted to stand out in it and feel the brunt of the storm so that I’d know everything about it; and after the storm—when my father said it was safe—I ran back out, bursting through the screen door, and the sun was streaming forth through the clouds, and the light glistened off the moisture in the grass, and the smell of ozone and soil and wet grass and pavement combined in perfection to stake the event forever in my memory. The humidity lingered for a few days after that, a remnant and reminder of the glory and power and beauty of the passing storm, and the seasonal change coming on, and of creation, the moisture sticking to my skin and gathering on my brow before it would roll down and soak into my shirt and I would agree with friends that the humidity made me miserable, but it didn’t. It made me feel alive and showed that the earth did, indeed, abide. After that, the mornings were cooler, and a week later was the first cool day as summer broke, and that was that.

I remember that as a boy at the very end of summer I caught a dozen grasshoppers down by the creek and I taped them by their legs to a paper kite so that (I believed) they would be the first ever grasshoppers to fly so high into the blue sky that they could see the earth curve away in the distance. But they flew that high on their own sometimes, and, insensate, didn’t care or feel one way or another about it like I did. My curiosity wasn’t theirs.

Later, I remember the first days of school, walking to the bus stop with new pencils and notebooks.

And, (older,) I remember ponds growing thick with cattails as the weather changed in October. The leaves, just some, were only then starting to turn to yellow, and some drifted down and floated on the pond. I’d smack mosquitos on my arms and neck, and dragonflies would swoop down on unseen currents to snatch mosquitos from the air, and if the dragonfly would settle on the surface of the water, tiny ripples making him rise and fall, a bass—all green and silver and shining in the sunlight—would break the surface tension of the water in one frightening upward explosion and swallow the dragonfly. And how I would toss my line close to the stand of cattails along a mossy tree trunk and the bass would rise to it and with a firm yank the hook would be set, and the dragonfly swallowed the mosquito, and the bass at the dragonfly, and I ate the bass. Circle of life or whatever.

There was an old song about autumn representing the autumn of our lives, and there is that too. It’s all happening either for you or to you. And it is all His, if He lets you see it.

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.