. . .

Someone said, "this Indian summer? It will come back again," and I wondered one more time: is this a quality of the Indian, that it returns predictably but unexpectedly, and with a gift of warmth and light it takes back again? Because it does not give? And this is indigenous--is that what we're saying? At least that's what I hear. So it resonates in my head with terms more openly hateful, "Indian giver," say: "don't be an Indian giver" from the mouths of babes and a grownup or two when I was old enough to recognize in it the same adult rage you hear in the child's rhyme:

So so suck your toe
all the way to Mexico
riding on a buffalo
dirty dirty Eskimo
stick your head in a toilet bowl
because my mother told me to pick the very best one so you are not going to be it for this time:

Who is, then, going to be it?

***

The term Indian summer has been used for more than two centuries. The earliest known use was by French American writer St. John de Crevecoeur in rural New York in 1778. There are several theories as to its etymology:

• It may be so named because this was the traditional period during which early North Americans First Nations/Native American harvested their crops.
• 
  
• In The Americans, The Colonial Experience, Daniel J. Boorstin speculates that the term originated from raids on European colonies by Indian war parties; these raids usually ended in autumn, hence the extension to summer-like weather in the fall as an Indian summer. Indeed, two of the three other known uses of the term in the 18th century are from accounts kept by two army officers leading retaliation expeditions against Indians for raids on settlers in Ohio and Indiana in 1790, and Pennsylvania in 1794.

• It could be so named because the phenomenon was more common in what were then North American Indian territories, as opposed to the Eastern Seaboard.

• It may be of Asian Indian origin rather than North American Indian. H. E. Ware, an English writer, noted that ships traversing the Indian Ocean loaded their cargo most often during the Indian summer, or fair weather season. Several ships actually had an "I.S." on their hull at the load level thought safe during Indian summer.

The term is also used metaphorically to refer to anything that blooms late, or unexpectedly, or after it has lost relevance.


***

Wonder: what role does it have: it imposes itself on me: what is it about amazement that awakens the question? What is it about the beauty of a face that awakens the question in me?

(notes from Br. Thomas on three wisdoms)

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