More helicopters are falling this year. Not the real ones; not yet. These are the papery maple seeds. They float down, spinning on a single feather. They coat the sidewalks, collect in planters, nest in gutters. In the evening, they glow, lit from behind, the sun red and hazy from the Canadian wildfires.
At the tennis courts, some of the helicopters have sprouted into seedlings. Two leaves on each stem, rooted in the fault line cracks of the hard-topped courts. For now, they have avoided being hit by our serves or trampled by our feet. In ten years, if left alone, without us, they’d split the courts, eventually towering amongst the crumbling electoral poles.
We wouldn’t know it, and it wouldn’t matter.