Summer's End

Once grandmothers sat on the bench and watched over the little girls entrusted to them, all summer long.

Christina, one of those girls, back when she was ten, told me that she was never going to leave Blissville. She pointed to the brown shingled house in front of the bench and said that was where her great grandmother had been born, where she, Christina, lived now, where her whole family lived. Christina said she planned to to marry and return to live there, for the rest of her life. This house, this neighborhood, they were the world she knew and loved.

No one sits on the bench any more, either to rest or watch over little ones. Too many houses have air-conditioning. And Christina, now with two daughters of her own, has moved. As have her mother and her grandmother, another part of Blissville's history gone elsewhere.

But the bench is not entirely unoccupied. Tucked inside the London plane tree that serves as its back was a flowering of coprinus micaceus, inky caps. Edible, but not recommended.