Is it summer?

We’re at the tail end of dragonfly season, and well into firefly season. I try to remember to stay up a little late to catch a brief show, but that doesn’t mostly happen. Before firefly season is over though, I need to take a walk down the street to the Omega property. It’s 280 acres of wildness and wetlands, where the fireflies drip down like a molten gold rush, appearing from nothing in the darkness, drifting or darting, and returning to nothing. This property is their joint, their hangout. Other places are ok, but Omega is the spot for fireflies!

I’m always amazed when this place comes fully back to life just how alive can be. I guess long winters do that. You forget. Other creatures than us, wiser creatures, migrate and hibernate. Now with the summer in full swing they return, without winter baggage. The fireflies are melting the night, birds that I don’t know the names of are filling the day with songs, and all manner of the world growing in visibly markable speeds. It sometimes feels more dream than real. It seems a small crime to feel that way. But I don’t fight it.

Maybe that unreal state is thanks to the weather right now: hot, dry, windy as all get out…weather that makes you say “If this goes on for too long, I don’t know what I’m going to do”; full well knowing that in some probable future, for some period of days, it will go on too long. But not this time…probably.

It’s weather that made me wonder, while I was out moving irrigation and trying to time it all to get the most area covered that day. “What am I doing out here. Is it really worth it just to…y’know…grow food?” Seemed like as logical a question as any with a half melted brain. I put this question to Mar, who is the sole full time crew member at the moment, as we were pulling all manner of covers onto freshly seeded vegetable beds. She suggested perhaps we should go to McDonalds instead. This also seemed oddly valid, which is an indicator that maybe full brain melt had been achieved.

We kept working.