This past weekend I spent a little time in an antique store. The knick knacks and torn quilts looked sleepy and forgotten, but not lost. Fabric from a hundred years ago or more hung draped in streams of sunlight that swam with dust. The patterns so faded that the sun had no effect on them whatsoever.

That’s how I spent a good portion of my weekend. Tucked away, working on a sneeze in the back of a shop. I didn’t buy anything. And I didn’t trade any valuable part of me for any items. No one asked what I was doing there.

When I left, I breathed the saturated air that you can find at the shore. And I realized that, in the shop, the world had been dampened; a dampening broken now by the crashing waves and the cruising cars, broken by child’s laughter and traveler’s conversation, or a dog bark.

I realized the store had been cold when I felt the sun on my face, and dark when I lowered the sunglasses from the top of my head to wear them.

I don’t know if the feeling of being cold and hushed was sitting on a shelf in the store. Maybe it sat beside the doll whose eye had been missing for so long that the discolored fabric where it had been stitched no longer stood out against the rest of the face. I may have picked up the feeling when I shifted a stack of chipped dishes, or lifted that book that required two hands when handling to keep its spine and pages together. And if I did take the cold and the silence with me, carried it past the woman who was half asleep at the register, no one called me a thief.

The air has been warm lately. At night, if we leave the window open, we wake up in a sweat. The moon has a circle around it from the humidity. Some nights, it has a nice thick ring that looks like a cloud came to it like a moth to a porch light.

Normally I can walk down the sidewalk for hours. When I was in high school, we’d leave just after lunch, and we wouldn’t be home until dinner was getting cold. In the summer, gosh, that was so much later than we thought. Sometimes it’d be eight or nine o’clock before we’d realize the sun was trying to go down.

These days I have a lot to think about. More tough decisions and hard questions on my mind. At least, more than I did when I was in high school. Somewhere along the line, I got so much on my mind that I quit paying attention to street lamps. They seem taller these days, or I might be imagining things. It’s hard to tell in a city that I didn’t grow up in. They do catch my attention, though, when they go out.

Just from time to time, a street lamp will blink and go out, even if I’m standing right underneath it. It’s so dark. Like those nights we’d jumped a fence to get on the swings of our middle school playground. The rusty chains really screamed after dark, with no laughter or shouting. No crowds of kids. A couple of teenagers trying to creep each other out with spooky stories of trapped, dead janitors, or sharing details of our parents divorce, or just holding hands and looking up at the ring around the moon.

Hello Reader! You have stumbled upon the first entry in a new series of shorter posts to my blog that I am calling my Summer Shorts. In this series I will be regularly posting shorter stories, thoughts, concepts, poems, et cetera under this new subset of Holding The Universe Together. This may or may not detract from my somewhat regularly posted pieces that fall into different categories. We’ll have to find that out together. I hope you enjoy.

While walking along a sidewalk near a church, I spotted a particularly lovely flower. It stood out from its bush vibrantly yellow, with short, flat petals and about a thousand stamen (thank you 8th grade science) that gave it an almost dandelion, orb quality. It was, for lack of a better word, beautiful.

So much so that I stopped to admire it. During this admiration time I debated breaking it from it’s stem and taking it home for my girlfriend. She likes flowers and she might appreciate this one. I also thought that the church wouldn’t mind if I took their flower because church-going folk are a generous people.

I hadn’t yet leaned down to decapitate the plant when I had a new, revolutionary thought.

Why should I take this flower home and give it to one person, whom I do love, to enjoy its beauty when I could leave it here for a lot of people to enjoy even if my loved person never gets to see it?

I answered that question with an action. I turned and walked on along my path. Then I stopped about forty feet away to write this on my phone in the glaring sun.

I was in a hurry to jot this down before I forgot the feeling of having left something beautiful in the world to share with strangers rather than kill it for a loved one.