It’s a verbal retreat three out of the four seasons. In the first, spring buds tentatively brush the trellis while the winter weary shiver off winter’s chill, sip tea, and stretch their legs, grateful for the return of the patio. In the second, summer’s sultry air seasons casual and slow exchanges; conversations abundant with pauses and passing wishes. The third, autumn, marks the return to formal conversation, business-like in nature, fingers curling around mugs of rich coffee and wisps of cigarette smoke mingling with crisp air. Winter, the fourth season, brings the appearance of a ghost town; the white an unwelcome guest crashing into the conversation, silencing it.

Here on the patio, life’s events are discussed, worries are assuaged, jokes are exchanged, and all the while, birds peck at what is left behind. Scattered pages from the daily papers collect in the corners of the wooden benches, benches with well-worn seats and backs that could tell tales of all the people that had used them for a brief respite.

The patio is an unplanned party. Guests gather together and even though mingling is limited to occasionally sharing a table with a stranger or passing a section of the paper over, everyone here chooses to attend at the same time. There is a brief match-up in schedules, a simultaneous appearance here on these weather-beaten, wooden beams, before everyone scatters on their separate ways, just like the leaves that sweep the patio floor. Dust-coated construction workers return to their building projects, bright-eyed college students return to their classrooms and books, business professionals return to their desks.

But swirling in their bellies and stirring in their minds is the cup of coffee and the nearly (but not completely) forgotten memory of a shared moment on a small patio somewhere in a large city.