The Gnome and I

SUMMER. I love the spirit and sensations of summer... summer mornings blue and cloudless, and the sun smiling down as the earth wakes up embraced in delicious warmth. I love the call of singing insects, the way the woods opens up to mid-day and let all its voices out in clear, exalting choruses. How the winged members of summer, cicadas, katydids and grasshoppers, at sensing the proximity of humans become quiet, leaving you for a zilch of a moment barren, and isolated in the wholeness of complete silence. And it is just you, and those precious moments, and the aloofness of time pulling at the hems of my skirts...

I love the unsullied, fleeting songs of crickets. Their songs are musical to the human ear; pure, and low, and if I sit down for a moment, and my eyes pierce the cloudless blue, I like to think that there's a hole in the sky through which my eyes direct their focus beyond horizons. A window in time. This dense lushness of heavy days, the unpolluted greens and human-hushed afternoons braving storms of centuries. Summer spins its magic wand, and the world is not what it seems to be anymore. I mean, strange things are transpiring in my magical world on these hot summer days. But what, you'd ask? 

Yes, strange things, indeed. And believe me when I say I'm not making things up. Just only the other day last week, an odd little man—a gnome, perhaps—moved across our little white cottage. The morning I discovered him staring at our little white cottage from our neighbors' porch right across the street, I thought I was still dreaming. I had just woken up and was pulling up the blinds when I discovered him. I noticed the pointy ears coming out of super white hair that sprouted from his head in odd directions, saw the high cheekbones and long, long white bushy beard and I could not move from where I was standing behind the window in our master bedroom. Was his skin sorts of reddish, or did it have shades of gray? And who was he? I swear this stranger looks just exactly as this garden gnome here on this photograph, minus the pointy hat.  And I have proof of this too, only I'm not sharing the picture I took of him out of pure respect.

Ever since that morning last week, that's where I'd find my Gnome each and every day.  Sitting in that chair right across our little white cottage.  And the first thing I'd do after waking up each morning is going to the window to see if he's still there.

His vision makes me happy in an odd way.  Is he a real gnome in disguise coming back over three centuries? Did he run beneath the bushes and down the woody paths until he came to where he sits every morning, and watch my every move from the shadows of his balcony?

Imagination is a powerful thing, is it not! At least for me it is, and with those feelings of reconnaissance surveillance in my own yard it is impossible not to have imagination burst in a thousand fairy-tale. Thus, I'm starting to imagine things.  Things like I am in the garden playing Frida Kahlo, or occupied in pulling weeds or planting a new plant when all of a sudden the feeling that someone is peering at me pulls me right up. I turn around and, alas, there he'd be—the Gnome. So close to me I can feel my nose starting to itch under his musty smell. The Gnome gives me a fusty smile, and asks if perhaps I've seen his friend the Witch going this way or this other into the woods... I hear the trees ruffle under a sudden wind, I notice thick clouds shadowing the garden's floor, and deep in the forest the most unsettling of music...

Oh goodness gracious me, I do know how to spook myself really well, don't I? But really, life is beaming with strange, inexplicable things indeed, and strange things are blowing in through our neighborhood on the wings of summer winds. 

As it is, the other day while jogging I happened upon the Gnome again... in the most strangest of way, by the way.  All I can say is that when I started down the road the Gnome was sitting on his chair right across our little white cottage, watching me. Then I moved on... not a soul to be seen at that hour of day, not a dog to bark at my shadow, not a sound to disturb my tempo.  But as I was coming down that hilly road on the farthest side, on the other side of the neighborhood, all of a sudden... the Gnome!

He appeared like a vision floating in the heat of the day ahead of me.  A ghostly vision drifting in the distance crossing down the road.  I watched him going in the direction of one of the houses down there, but when I reached that particular house, for much that my eyes searched the premises, I couldn't find anyone.  It was just the silence of the balmy morning and the blue sky above... It was just me, and the Ghost Gnome.  Where did he go? And what was he doing on the other side of the neighborhood? 

When I got back home, I found him still sitting on his chair looking up at the clouds, just as I had left him... as if time had stopped, or as if time had never passed... for him, and for me.  Was it really him this vision I saw? Was he not?  Oh, I'm sure it must had been someone else that looked just like him from the distance.  But maybe... do you suppose our neighborhood is a magical neighborhood inhabited by gnomes and they are now revealing themselves to the world?  Or to me along?  Oh it must be that, I'm sure. Oh, I'm sure.