Straight Into August

 "Straight into August." So says Scott, as he stands at the newly opened front door, momentarily overwhelmed by the blast of hot air, and it’s only 9:30 am in June.  The day won’t get any cooler but the evening will and it will be magical.

Last night, twelve hours earlier, as I walked the brick path toward the dock to watch the moon’s reflection mirrored on the water I was inundated with fireflies, hundreds of tiny fireflies blinking in the evening’s late dusk. I stopped, then slowly sauntered among their flickering lights, not wanting to break the spell, imagining I could conceivably run into Puck. (For those who were not awake during high school literature classes, his antics existed in Midsummer Night’s Dream; love is not smooth and makes us do strange things.) I don’t remember seeing summer fireflies when I was a child. If I did, I would surely have tried to collect them in glass jars as children must have done through the ages. But here, fireflies endure, enchanting by their airiness. 

In Los Angeles, our little group would regularly hike the trails of Griffith Park during the summer evenings and occasionally encounter a little train of glowworms, another of nature’s anomalies. Inevitably, the Mills Brothers’ tune would come to mind. Perforce, I would sing the song to them, completely enthralled with their very existence, watching them change their neon like color as they appeared and disappeared along the rock formations. My hiking buddies were less than thrilled with my singing. Apparently I can’t carry a tune but as far as I’m concerned, it was their problem; I was happy singing to these little glowworms, wondering how it was they came to be and what their very being meant in nature’s grand scheme of things. Most of the time I think that once I’m dead, I’m dead and the party's over but every once in a while, when I see glowworms and fireflies, I wonder if perhaps there’s some creator putting this earthly package together. 

And then there’s the cicadas. Scott says I pronounce the name incorrectly. He says it’s pronounced si-kay-da, while I say it’s pronounced chi-kah-da. Too many years in Los Angeles with plenty of Mexicans, not to mention my own Italian roots, have taught me that “ci” is always pronounced “ch” and “ca” is always pronounced “kah”. Rather than argue, I tell him he’s right then go about my business and pronounce the word whichever way I choose. This year was to be the great cicada invasion and while that was the case on the western shore, no inordinate numbers invaded our little corner of heaven. Only the usual size swarms have passed through, noisily letting us know of their presence, enlivening the trees with their music, saying hello or hola. 

Facing the other side of the house, in the midst of the four acre pine forest, is a huge pond. We do nothing to it or about it. It continues to exist because it was there before us. It lives within its own ecosystem. Yellow lilies and white mallows preside at its edge and bull rush reeds sprout in the water on occasion. Then, just as dramatically, disappear. There is an entire civilization of frogs in the water’s midst, from what I can tell anyway. During the day, they quietly hang around on the pond’s edge, like louche barflies with nothing to do and nowhere to go. I see them when I walk the lane to collect the mail. They see me and jump into the water to safety. The twilight of evening carries the frogs’ songs. I understand the male frog sings prior to, or during sex, I’m not clear on that course of events, but whichever way the alluring “ribbits” work, there must be a lot of sex going on in those waters. It’s very noisy. So goes our summer.