Moments after awakening, your verve ignites the hope of one more day of Summer and you fly from bed covers sticking your landing on chilling quarter-sawn floors like Mary Lou Retton. Skating across the frozen floor you throw open the curtains (as if they were silken chenille drapery hung casually in your Latin Quarter Pied-à-terre) waiting to be awash in dawn’s low-horizon sunlight.
Disappointed, the monotonous Gray Gang rolled into town minutes after midnight like lawless gunmen in frontier westerns. Intimidated townsfolk peeked through barren curtains and set about fortifying their modest homes: Searching for gaps in windows and beneath doors they stuffed the clefts with thick, woolen remnants similar to pre-dawn dog walkers that shelter themselves behind fleece and neoprene.
The liberated leaves figure-skate about my feet then streak skyward caught in a draft like summer kites and the floating dreams of a child: All at once they’ve coagulated into knee-high tempests which zig and zag like adolescents chasing each other at noon time. Colors flash against skies of blue or gray or ashen citrine patch quilts. These October skies challenge the manufactured, yet awe inspired Independence
Day fireworks. The path, covered in a thoughtless arrangement of patterns and color like ballroom carpeting, have been crushed and watered and dissolved into an ingress of mislead and slippery shortcuts. In the day’s dusk, from afar the drained and disheartened scraping of pasted leaves to sidewalks which coincidently echoes the desperate sound of your repeated scraping of an overcooked and decoupaged fried egg from your sister-in-laws idyllic and maniacal “Panicured,” (the cookware’s equivalence of a mani-pedi).
That handful of cooled late summer sun slips through desperate fingers like sand, and jabs through gangways, half-naked trees, and slowly hibernating perennials. Yet each slice of sunlight reminds one of that perfectly chilled Cosmopolitan, sipped, as passers-by were evaluated, or that push-up pop and root beer float enjoyed during a devastating humid evening, or slightly and lightly limed key lime pie savored beneath Mrs. Landowski’s heirloom Sycamore that breezy summer afternoon. We hope we can squeeze just one more day of memories to keep our hope inflated, like the 
boy two doors down who’s anxiously and devotedly pumping a chronically flat rear tire is wholly disinterested in the waning blossoms and bye-bye of blue birds and tumbling bumblebees all which undoubtedly signify Summer’s surrender to Fall. But if we cease pining for what is lost and watch that boy two doors down, we might learn a lesson which the earth has known for eons: Summer is but one season in four, four which may not be idolized as Summer, but which bring changes that tickle nature just like a favored uncle or aunt might’ve brought penny treasures which I adored.
And like the forever flattened tire that the boy two doors down finally acquiesced, try as hard as you might, we’re simply observers of a world that remains true to it’s own change of seasons, or, if you will, its life’s purpose. What might our world be if we expressed an unwavering commitment to who we are and what we do?
Mania is rich with almost-entertaining stories of bravado, of haphazard action, of disobeying most laws, of discarding 
Sanity does her best to shield Mania from their sickening taunts; too late: liking to the daring distillers in 
no sound, no movement, no promises. What began as a search to stop the irritating question about eyeglasses evolved into a simple and translucent construction of glass, plexiglass, hardwood, and 
