Today is a perfect day. It is 77°. The bright, bright sun is framed in a deep blue sky. Every now and then a leaf is ruffled by a slight, transient breeze. The dogs are napping. They are exhausted from eating a few treats and visiting the yard after a long sleep. I want to be my dog.

Bugs never bother me, have never bothered me. I am not a fan of mosquitos. I don’t understand why they exist, the same with flies. I remember being in awe of a praying mantis. It appeared in the garden by the front door. I thought it the strangest, most amazing looking bug I had ever seen. In Africa I saw my first centipede. I knew what it was and quickly moved away. They bite. A scorpion I didn’t see was running across the floor of my living room. One of my students saw it, grabbed my sandal and did away with the scorpion. I saw fire ants. They were fast and were running in what seemed an endless column of ants. I was so mesmerized I stood and watched for longest time. I was late to tech my class.

When I was a kid, my world was filled with wonder. Just steps away from my house was the field. In the summer it was filled with tall green grass and inhabited by brown grasshoppers. We used to run to make the grasshoppers jump. I’d wcatch them with my hands and put them in a jar with holes in the top. My hands would get brown spots. I figured it was grasshopper poop. I never kept the grasshoppers. The game was to see how many I could catch. I always let them go back into the grass. On one side of the field was a copse. It was where we found a shack which had a pile of girly magazines. We were still so young the pictures shocked us. We didn’t stay there long. In the back the field ended at the dead tree. It was just a trunk and a big limb which was still attached but on the ground. We could go around it, but we never did. We climbed over it. No self respecting kid walked around it.

We followed a path from the dead tree to the swamp which was in an opening surrounded by woods. The path continued beyond the swamp and ended at a paved street. Much later, long after I had moved, the field, the woods and the swamp were replaced by elder housing. My father used to call it wrinkle city.

This entry was posted on October 5, 2025 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.