When I was last here, the cicadas were out in full force.
We’d had a gypsy moth infestation, and their corpses littered the ground. I don’t mind bugs, but the eggs get to me so I spent a lot of time spraying them off the wrought iron fence with the hose. In those two weeks I spent hours in the pool, swimming and floating and diving for coins. It was like being a child again. I missed my last couple years of childhood, whether from illness or social disturbance or the pandemic that’s robbed us all of two years of life, so it was in many ways a relief to be able to relax. To let myself go and just exist in a place I felt comfortable.
It’s autumn now, and we’re back. I’ve never seen the trees look like this before—where I grew up we didn’t have autumn. The leaves turned brown and fell and became muck beneath our feet and the wheels of my bike. The only real difference was whether my hands were chapped from the cold and the soap our school used.
I’m sitting where I did for those two weeks of the summer, but the pool is closed up and the falling leaves have replaced the cicadas and katydids and swarms of gypsy moths.
The wind blows and my hair’s a little shorter now, a little closer to the way I want myself to be. The leaves are falling and by the time we’re gone there will be more on the ground than holding on tight to the branches of the maples leaning over into the back yard.
It’s strange to be in one place long enough to watch the seasons die, the shift from the dog days of an Indian summer to cool wind and spices and leaves turning red as the world gets ready for winter.
We’re tired, her and I, but while she sleeps I’ll carry on, waiting for those days of green blurring together and the gypsy moths falling from the sky like rain.
