Seasons of a Small Town

The first Friday of September the Wheatland Antelopes played Harding County at home under the lights, and the whole town came, the way the whole town always comes, and the bleachers on the home side filled from the top down the way they always do, older first, because the older people know the top rows are warmer and the view is better and the kids will make too much noise at the bottom. The drought had finally broken on the Wednesday before with a quiet rain, and the grass on the field was green again for the first time in six weeks, and the field smelled the way a football field smells when it has been watered, which is the smell the coach had been waiting on all summer without saying so. The lights came on at seven twenty-two, which was eight minutes before they needed to, because the man who runs the lights, Virgil Porter, has been running the lights since the Carter administration and he likes to see them come on while there is still some sky, so that he can watch the sky lose to the lights, which he considers one of the few contests in this life that is reliably decided in favor of the thing a man has built. The national anthem was sung by a junior girl whose voice had not yet decided what kind of voice it was going to be, and it cracked on the word free the way it always cracks in September because September is when the voice is still a voice trying, and the crowd let