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.