As I sit here and write, I hear my mother working in the kitchen cleaning it up - perpetual mess that it is. She and my sister are bantering back and forth noisily about the question of technology. I can smell tomatoes. They are all over the house. Mommy brought them in from the garden because her plants are dying. Half-ripened tomatoes are on all the window sills, lined in rows in a variety of colors and shapes as the weak afternoon light shines in on them. It makes me feel like autumn. There is that cold sweet smell in the air of rotting fruit. The grass looks like long tangled mats of pale green hair. Everything is losing its manicured summer look. I am too, although you can't see it with your eyes. Too many things to do, too many important decisions to make, all swirling around and around my head as though caught by the autumn wind. Like dry leaves being driven down the street with a cold wind snapping at their heels, my thoughts tumble out of the orderly piles I've placed them in, swirling up, then falling back into confusion and chaos. I can't keep them straight. They eddy up around me, swishing up into mini-cyclones and then falling back, subsiding, once again forgotten. There are no bags to hold them. They go where the winds take them. No decisions have been made. c