Trickster

Once when I was a kid, and we had just got back from a trip to the Smoky Mountains, my dad showed slides from the trip. In among the March images was this crazy picture of a black bear sticking his snout out from behind some flowers. I was dumbfounded. "Where was I when you took that picture?" "Weren't you scared?" "Did you get any other pictures of the bear?" It was only years later that I realized the image was fake, one of those slides you buy in a gift store. It was the flowers that gave it away. We were there in March and there was nothing blossoming. This picture has that feel about it. Here we are, temperatures and leaves dropping, and here's this flower. It seems so out of place. Our dahlias, too, are gorgeous right now, but summer is done. They should be dead.