Mostly Wet

The heat has broken, and the world feels... mostly wet. The sky has been grey for a week; the mornings start out cool and the afternoons turn to just comfortable. This is not a spring wet, but an autumn wet, and the difference is thick in the air. There are no tender green stems shooting up through the soil, but instead fungi creeping up beneath walls and mushrooms spreading below stretches of clovers.

The Cicadas are still sticking it out. They drive their metallic creaks into my mind like a nail when I would listen or when I would have silence, but otherwise they blend nicely into the background and I forget. I do not enjoy them, but I do wonder, Is a summer without Cicadas still a summer? This is the sound: There is a tentative rubbing, fast and short, a sort of cree-cree.... cree-cree.... .... cree-cree-cree. It advances; becomes almost a wowowowow... they do this the most, and I think the sound is most akin to an electric toothbrush in use. Then, for a few sustained moments, utter chaos, loud, almost defeaning, the kind of sound that makes you look up into the branches below in amazement that the musician is not visible.

Yes, they are still here, but I'm not sure how much longer they will be. They have begun to litter the sidewalks, decaying corpses swarming with ants for days, leaving first only their tiny sets of translucent wings, and then, nothing at all.

At lunch I set my pita bread down on my pudding so neither would touch the planter, and when I came back, lifted it, and took a good healthy bite, I was met with incredulous stares and laughter. They had all thought it was some amazing mutant mushroom, and I had to admit, it did look convincingly like one.