Summer is over. The seductive music of elsewhere is looking like a confused, lost art form on the streets of Penticton.

While on the streets of Okanagan Falls, the retirement homes of ten years back have been losing their shingles, steadily, while the sun loungers, air conditioners and outboard boat motors have all been packed away onto dead trucks, and the fences have collapsed. Years ago. Summer is over.

The last saskatoons are still here, though, dried on the stalk, amongst the cottonwoods and poison ivy behind the church dumpster.

The quince is offering unpicked fruit.

And the clouds are beginning to have a conversation without us above Silver Star Mountain in Vernon.

Yes, summer is over. In the age of the Anthropocene, this is when the Earth starts going on again without us. The old ones wake at Vaseaux Lake.

At OK Falls, too.

The only sense of loss and “fall” here is the romantic one of people a long way from home, which is sad, because home is so close.

Vaseaux Lake

Home is not a place.