Asakiyume mita

Last year around this time I was terribly unhappy to not hear any field crickets. I remember walking around the block and hearing only one, chirping away in a lonesome solo.

One friend on LJ suggested that maybe they come out later--and indeed, later last year I did hear a fuller chorus of them, and I told myself that maybe I'd only imagined hearing them all summer long all my life--but no; I was right to remember hearing them, because this year I hear them in full strength--now, in June. It makes me so happy. They must have had a bad year last year. But they came back! They came back.

And fireflies. So many fireflies this year, when last year--well last year I didn't have much chance to go out looking for them. But this year: many.

Also many? Tiny toads at the Mt. Greylock Reservation. Mt. Greylock is the highest mountain in Massachusetts, which isn't saying much, honestly, but still. It's as high as we get around here. Wakanomori usually does a trail race at the mountain for father's day, but Covid-19 won't permit such things, so he did a solo run up the mountain via the road. For my part, I hiked part of a trail, and every time I put a foot down, little tiny toads, the size of the pad of my thumb, hopped away. There was also an abundance of chipmunks. Some dashed away with tiny chipmunk squeeks when I came along, others just kept up with their daily tasks, unbothered.

After working all day, tonight, when it was all soft and dark out, and the breeze felt pleasantly cool, the forest creatures and I went out to look at the fireflies, or the moon, or both.

It ended up being both--the fireflies spangling the fields on one side of the road, pure magic, and the moon the color of lemon custard and bright as a candle flame above the other.

--okay but here's what I've been thinking about. It's because of getting all these extra immunizations to go to East Timor. Immunizations and prophylactic medicines: they're like wards. I feel like the medical establishment is laying spell upon spell upon me: "Now you will be able to walk through flames and over scorpions, and you will emerge unscathed." (Except really what they said was, "You know this typhoid shot is only 80 percent effective, so be careful of what you eat" but even so. Eighty out of one hundred typhoid scorpions will not sting me.)

But I can't help thinking, What about everyone who lives there all the time? I bet they're not on prophylactic doxycycline all their lives. They have to just rely on mosquito nets and bug spray to keep away malaria. Or, y'know, they just get it. And same with all the other ailments. But I get to waltz covered in wards. Oh: and whatever germs I might be carrying with me from New England, they're certainly not warded against. ... I shall try not to breathe on people.

catalpa wands: blossoms threaded on grass