Sleepy Zebes

The season changed last week. The wind kicked up, the clouds blanketed the sky, and our subtropical summer briskly gave way to seasonally and historically appropriate temperatures. It’s colder on the top floor of my pre-war apartment building where the wind howls through the stairwell and the breeze breaches the windows, and so I feel in my bones that it is time to go apple picking. It is time to get tickets for Hanif’s annual show. It is time to listen to History Books and make chili. It is time to reread The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. It’s been kicking my ass this year. I’ve read two pages a day, tops. The 200-year old grammar and syntax, always a hurdle, has become a wall. And I just haven’t been able to read much at all this past week. The books I’ve been working through each day are piled on the coffee table. My focus isn’t there. Still, I persist. Most things worth reading, to me, have been challenging. Slogs, even. The classics I liked and disliked in AP Lit. The theory books I…