When I was a child, Octobers used to be cold. This was back in the country where I was born, and though I know the nights never freeze so early anymore, they did once upon a time. And yet there would always be a day or two in those Octobers when the weather seemed to regret itself, when the sun leaned down towards the earth and the smell of frost and coal was swept away in a gust of warm golden air.

In my country, people called those balmy autumn days "old women's summer." The word we used in my language was not the nicest word for women, but some said it was close to the word for weavers, since during that short surge of warmth, thousands of tiny spiders would hatch all at once and set sail on the wind, flossing all the world with pale, bright threads, which perhaps also looked like old women's hair. In this new country—if I can call it new, having lived here for over half my life, having spoken its language longer than my mother tongue—those webs make people think of feathery down, and so they call that time "goose summer," so that the spider silk itself has become known as "gossamer."

But I did not know all of this when I was small. All I knew was that the old women who lived across the courtyard between apartment houses could always sense the shift in atmosphere before anyone else. Perhaps they felt it in the brittle stitching of their bones. Or perhaps they heard a message in the fluted gossiping of birds. Either way, I would see the old women already out on their balconies in the silver morning, laps full of yarn and needles, knitting as the sun rose over the roofs and poured into the withered gardens below.

By afternoon, all the windows would be hinged wide, all the town would be out of doors, as if we had no will to refuse the invitation of warmth. It's hard to imagine now, but the winter was so much colder for us then with the rationed coal, so much darker before the buildings were painted yellow, peach, blue. It was like living in a black-and-white film in those days, everything a variation of grey, from our clothes and faces to the houses and trees, even the sun in the winter sky. We had a word in my language which meant more than giving a present, which meant giving something dear. To be granted summer again, if just for one day, was such a gift.

In the parks and gardens, little grills were brought out, and our noses filled with the smell of sizzling sausage and charred bread as we children wrapped ropes of dough around sticks and roasted them over the flame. There would be bowling games with blocks of wood on the lawn, there would be stacks of rusty leaves for jumping, there would be yeasted cake with the last of the small, hard plums no one ever had to wait in line for because they grew in every courtyard. And all around, clinging to our shirtsleeves, braided into our sweaty hair, there would be the filaments of silk, so fine and interlaced and everywhere that, whenever they caught the light, it was as if the fabric of the world itself had for once become visible, aglow.

And when the warm evening began to cool, when the sky tightened once more with frost even as our sunburned ears began to tingle and ache, we would all go home. But from my bedroom window, I would watch the old women still on their balconies as they broke the last stray ends of their yarn. One by one, they offered the strands to the air, though for what, I never knew. It is impossible to think they could have simply thrown them away; in those days, we used even such small scraps to felt, to spin, to patch a hole. You might say the old women tossed those strands then for luck, for the birds and their nests. Yet now that I am old as well, I would say something else. I would say the old women were claiming their place in that weather named for them after all. Weaving a piece of all they had touched into that brief, shining web.


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