end of summer, and strange hats

Dreams of a pool next door; a guest room in a summer house owned by the Bells, all windows, with my own linens on the bed and I couldn't decide whether to leave them for a winter visit or take them off, and home.

A herd of 60 or 70 horses going hungry found its way into our pastures, homeless or driven out of wild places; making no sense- we were not feeding them (they were too many) and in the late season the grasses of our pastures were depleted almost immediately from their presence, so day after day they milled around, switched places. Each day, mid afternoon, a pack of drooling and cruel-looking black wolves would appear. I didn't see any of the horses eaten, but I knew there must have been disappearances day by day. I trusted that they'd not catch our three horses, the healthy ones, strong and fast as we'd been feeding them. As the herd grew weaker and hungrier, they'd take to lying on their sides in the nighttime, a disturbing view in such numbers- like a vision of giving-up en masse.
(Wouldn't they have been better off without fences? What good was it doing them? Keeping them away from grasses, unable to outrun the wolves.)

I wanted one last swim in the pool before the summer was gone, but I kept finding things to pack; several cloth hats of the sort that frame the face- postmodernly embellished revisitations of long outmoded headwear. I couldn't decide which one to wear. Relatives everywhere; the kids didn't know enough to be dismayed by the horses.