Once about ten years ago, I wasn't doing very well and I went to see a shrink. There were some specific triggers that I knew were bothering me, but in the course of the consultation, she was asking me about my history and in the course of that, I said, 'I don't know if this is anything but for some time now I notice I get feeling down always around the same time of year, like it's a seasonal thing. Only it's not in the winter, it's always in May or June.'
'Ah,' she had said, nodding, 'Reverse S.A.D.D.'

Hah, 'Reverse SADD' indeed. I'm a bit skeptical. It's not a depression or anything like that, it's more like a feeling of melancholy. And I don't really mind it. When I get this way, I get to feeling like I'm too heavy to move but that also in the next second my entire body will start floating away, lazily, like a balloon, rotating slightly and bouncing lightly off a tree limb on the way up. It's like there's two of me, and one is just above me, hovering, watching the other one go about his daily stuff. It's very odd but like I said, I don't really mind it.

Whatever it is, it's on my mind when I realize we're at that time of year and sorta expect it to creep up on me. This year, though, it hasn't happened... yet.

This year, the weather suddenly turned soggy, as if we're already in August and the 'dog days' of summer and it's barely June. The only time to be outside is after the sun goes down, and so I sit outside on my front porch in the sultry night and read and write and think about things.

At that time of evening, it's been very quiet on my street. I've been using the time to water the lawn, since we've had no rain, and as I tug the sprinkler and the hose around the little front area, I look back and up at my house and feel a bit of that melancholy.

A bird or two chirps once as they get settled down, and maybe you can hear a sprinkler going from down the block. Former occupants planted boxwood and in the night it releases its sweet scent. In the dark, my house is a giant ivory mass and looks so tranquil with its windows all lit from inside, with shades and curtains. On my front porch, I can see a view of much of the street, all silent ivory masses with front porches and lit windows with shades and curtains and I can imagine that things were maybe not much different on this street fifty, seventy or ninety years ago.

Grace sits at the screen, watching for cats, cats who slink around after dark, moving forward with tender front paws. She starts panting heavily and squeaking when she spots one.

Catty-corner from my house, there is a streetlamp that is framed by the trees. Its light shines through an almost perfect rondo of leaves. I will sit on my porch and look at it. Something -- a bat? -- may flutter through occasionally.

The other day, I was talking with my gay neighbors, a couple of guys who are fixing the house across the street. They asked me, 'Did you see the old woman who was standing in front here yesterday?'

She had lived in their house with her aunt until she was 15, she had said. She was now 85. She had come back from South Carolina for a visit. 'Wow,' I said, 'what did she have to say?'

She had said there was only about half the houses on the block then, when she was a little girl, and she used to ride her bike up and down the block. The house next door wasn't there, it had been her aunt's garden. 'What happened to the tree in front of here?' she had wanted to know, and my neighbors told her they had just pulled it down last year. 'Does it still have a window seat in the Dining Room?' she had wanted to know, and my neighbors showed it to her. 'That's where I kept all my toys,' the woman said.

The girl's aunt had been an astute businesswoman, apparently. She told them her aunt had built some of the houses on the street, and as they pointed out which ones, I suddenly noticed that despite remodelings by different sets of owners, they were the same essential bungalow underneath.

From my neighbors', I looked back across the street to my place, larger, two-storied, framed by its gum trees and boxwoods and porch awnings. 'Did she say anything about my house?'

'No,' my neighbors said, 'but I bet it was around. If she's 85 now that meant she was here in 1935 and I bet your place was built before that.'

'Yeah, my place was supposedly built in 1929.' The height of 20s exuberance; the height of this city's industrial prosperity. As I look at my house, I notice the brickwork on both is exactly the same: Checkerboard-patterned porch railings with pink-hued mortar. 'I bet her aunt had something to do with my place,' I say, 'I'm sorry I didn't see that old gal when she was here.'

Back then, this neighborhood was the edge of town. The main road at the end of the street had only two lanes and everything else was fields. Everyone was still talking then about the great flood of 1913 (of which there has been a Ken Burns-style PBS documentary running much too much of late. At work, I joke with a coworker that his pregnant wife should call and tell him 'Good-bye, the levee has broken.').

Seventy years later, the neighborhood is still peaceful at night. I sit and read on the front porch and think about things.