Nine: Summer Rise, Summer Set.

The next three days were a blur of hither and thither activity that felt like nothing more than just that: I had caught the end of summer blues, and was feeling rather lackluster.

I spent the morning with a pair of different musical hermits, who aggravated my hangover with their innovative renditions of Bizet’s opera Carmen, to my great dismay, which I fear was but thinly disguised.

I spent that afternoon with Pipton, reading, and the evening with one of the most famous hermits of all time, Santa Claus, who jovially explained to me his true involvement in the Christmas holiday (he invented the concept to promote global altruism through international gift exchanges, but when the idea was pirated by a co-operative of multi-national toy corporations--his face and name kept as the figurehead against his will--he became a hermit and has since been formulating a counter-initiative, nicknamed “Project The Grinch”, to re-create Christmas as the holiday it was originally intended to be.) (You can expect the evidences of this initiave to become apparent beginning 2009, if all goes as planned).

The day after that I listlessly bummed about with Calvin in his garden, then went to visit Herman and Delia (who are officially ‘a couple’ by the way. Claudia, Vance, and Shirelle fixed the spell so that Delia can keep her legs--sans nasty sleeping side-effects--as long as she takes one herbal pill each morning and evening) They are quite happy, and moving back to the mountains together, along with Eleanor, Pooka, and Augie, of course.

The day after, I woke up and the forest was empty. Just like that.

Even though the hermits’ presence was undetectable by the naked eye, I could just feel it: the difference was palpable.

In true hermit style, Willoughby and I slipped away without ceremony, without saying goodbye to Pipton or Calvin. Who invented goodbyes anyway? What a dumb idea.

We didn’t speak much on the ride home and once we had snuck back into our urban hermitage, after we had un-packed our few things and napped, after we had eaten some late-night pancakes and sipped some herbal tea, we stood on the fire-escape and in the relative quiet of the wee-morning hours, we were sure we could hear it:

the quiet shuffle across prairies, over mountains, through forest and brush; the pitter-patter of light footfall across dells, to farms, to the ends of country-lanes thought to be abandoned. The brush of steps towards remote ranches, to caves and bungalows.

It was the end of summer, and hermits everywhere were returning from their Annual Convention.