By Sofia Samatar
“The Friendly City” is a weekly column about walking in Harrisonburg that will run during 2024. Each week, your friendly correspondent, writer and teacher Sofia Samatar, will reflect on a walk in our city.
The perfection, the absolute perfection of a golden September day in the Friendly City.
An alertness, a subtle liveliness is infiltrating the air. Early in the morning, pink clouds glisten against a sky with a half-hidden, smiling luster in its blue, like an extra layer of lacquer. As the light grows, the clouds lose their blush, turning into wandering isles of radiant whiteness, with distinct slate-blue shadows on their flanks, like forests on a hillside, drifting across a sea of sky.
There were hints of what was coming for a few days. You could feel it in the freshness of the air, the coolness of your evening walks. You put on a long-sleeved shirt. And now what was approaching has arrived: slender breeze, warm sun, no humidity, and pure, bright light on this house where paper bags are hanging up on the porch, where they must be drying something, you imagine, or trying to ward off wasps. And the creek, which looked so cloudy and strange last week—a motionless, milky olive green, as if detergent had been dumped in it—is running brown and transparent, showing the edge of every stone. The water has become as clear as the sky.
Pale green hydrangeas touched with red, as if dusted with cinnamon sugar.
Gossamer on the trees. Deep pools of jade-green shade at the foot of the hill. It’s as if summer is turning over in its bed, settling itself, exposing a silvery flicker of its autumn blanket, then turning again, heating up, half waking, because certainly there will be more hot days before the season changes, but the summer is unmistakably growing drowsy, snuggling down, preparing to drop off under a carpet of fallen leaves.
A buttery glow suffuses the old house across the street, coating the peeling walls, rusty roof, and chipped chimney with the precious, amber gloss of hardened caramel.
Two mushrooms in a grassy yard reflect the light with a stout, martial glare, like a pair of brass buttons.
Cosmos flowers riot in the gardens, their color recalling a certain firm, vivid, almost piercing yellow-orange crayon you used as a child to draw the sun.
A burst of blooms. A flourishing of color that seems to be pressed urgently out of the plants, like a cardinal’s song from its throat. As if something is saying: Now, before it’s too late. Now, the fleshy sunflowers nodding over the top of a wall, the great yawning hollyhocks in their almost criminal crimson, the ragged extravagance of the chenille with its flowers like fat red pipe cleaners, the amaranths in clusters of fiery coals. Now the zinnias and petunias in sunset-orange and cherry-pink, the dahlias in crinkled globes like colorful paper lanterns, the butterfly bush with its purple spires of incense. And everywhere, now, now, the crape myrtle laden with its burgundy, ruby, or lavender burden.
So many flowers are yellow, pink, or red, the streets of the city seem bordered with a steady flame. Cockscombs unfurl the stiff, almost shocking claret brilliance of their fans. Scarlet trumpet vines clamber over a fence, while down below the humble pumpkin flower contributes the lax, weathered yellow of a pair of old gardening gloves.
But as if to protest, to insist that the warm-toned flowers will not have the season all to themselves, chicory winks along the sidewalk with winsome blue eyes, morning glory drapes its cobalt mantle over a hedge, and the balloon flower explodes into a veined violet star.
There are white flowers, too, that edge the streets with foam. The white crape myrtle and butterfly bushes stand like brides among their florid sisters. Ivory garlic chives flower in kitchen gardens. And all along this rustic alley, smothering the wall, the autumn clematis pours out effervescent constellations with the mouthwatering aroma of waffles and syrup.
If you dropped down suddenly in this place without knowing the time of year, you might think it was spring. But then the fading roses would give the season away, here at the corner where they offer their last, sad, powdery scent, some still faintly pink, one with a bee inside it, but most of them already sallow, drooping in clotted clumps like peach cobbler, and on the lower branches already dried into a brittle, antique fabric, a netting of brown lace.
Between the throbbing summer and this cooler, springlike season, there was a bridge of rain. I remember, after a sudden shower, watching three children run barefoot along the gutter, splashing through the coral petals of the crape myrtle that had blown down during the storm—a glut of flowers so abundant it blocked the drain, spreading out in lakes of rosy silk trimmings, tumbling down the hill to pile up thickly at a bend in the street in evanescent banks of cotton candy.
The stillness of the morning. Shrill, incessant birds and insects. And what is that delicate fragrance on the air? That elusive, woody, invigorating scent—is it soil? Is it just the dew on the grass? Is it autumn?
