The Sweatshirt Comes Out of the Drawer

The overnight air finally broke. By four in the morning the windows were open and the curtains moved on a draft, something they had not done since June. The humidity that had pressed on the yard all month lifted sometime after midnight, and the air at dawn was dry enough to carry sound. It was the first cool morning the month had offered, and it arrived in the last week of August.

In the bedroom dresser, the bottom drawer holds the winter things. The sweatshirt has been there since the last cold morning in May, folded once and left alone. On this morning the drawer opens and the sweatshirt comes out. It is a plain gray one, heavier than a shirt, with a collar that sits high. The fabric is cool and stiff from months of stillness, and it smells of cedar and the inside of the house.

The first one up pulls it over a cotton nightgown. It goes on easily, because the sleeves are loose and the cuffs are stretched. It hangs to the hips and covers the hands when the arms are crossed. The point of a sweatshirt on an August morning is to hold off the cool for an hour.

The sweatshirt knows things. Its elbows are worn smooth from other late Augusts. The pocket in front carries a hole at the corner, and the hem has been sewn once, crookedly. There was a time when it was somebody's, with a name written on the tag, but that has been washed away. It is no longer a piece of clothing so much as a season that learned to fold.

The legs below the hem are bare. August mornings are not so cold that they ask for pants. The feet are in the same thin socks worn all summer, and there is a brief, silly dance on the porch step when the bare soles meet the dew. Then the coffee begins, and the cool air becomes the reason to stand close to the stove.

By the middle of the day it is too much. The sun is still late-summer hot, and the sweatshirt ends up on the rail of the porch or the back of a kitchen chair. It lies there in the afternoon, empty, its arms reaching toward the floor. But the evening is different. The heat goes out of the day early now, and the sweatshirt goes back on for the last half hour outside. The crickets have changed their pitch. The light through the trees is longer and yellower than it was in July.

The first cool morning of late August is a thing of its own. The air still smells of corn and road dust and the last cut of hay. The garden is still producing, the tomatoes heavy on the vine. But the sweatshirt understands the shift before the calendar does. It knows why the morning window opens instead of the fan, why the coffee cup feels warm against the palms, why the dog curls into a circle on the porch instead of flat out in the shade.

For the next week, the sweatshirt lives on the chair at the foot of the bed. Some mornings it is needed, some mornings it is not. The night air trades a degree or two back and forth, almost as if it cannot make up its mind. But the drawer stays open, the sweatshirt stays out. The rest of the winter clothes remain in their place, resenting the early riser. Only this lightest layer is needed now, the one that has always stood between the end of August and everything that comes after.

By the first of September the mornings will be cooler still, and the second sweatshirt will come down from the shelf. But that is another thing entirely. For now it is still August, deep in its last week, and the gray sweatshirt is enough. It hangs over the back of the chair in the early light, waiting for the next cool hour to come around again.