It has been two weeks since my last post. Ah, I could go on making excuses, about how summer is just so delicious, how my freelancing has really picked up in the last month, how I've got a story brewing to post on fanfiction.net, how Pat had surgery last Friday to repair two broken metacarpal bones...but that's all they'd be - excuses. So instead, let's move forward, with a little something I wrote last June 18, but that I never got around to posting.
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Yesterday, the sky was crowded over the street where I live, as this year’s hatch of mayflies took to the air in a desperate but dignified bid to cram as much breeding and flying and just plain living as possible into their oh-so-ephemeral existence. Their swarm cloud was thousands-strong, hovering and undulating among the cedars and pines. For a while, a robin perched on a power line in their midst, turning over an interesting tidbit in its beak. Before long, it presumably retreated to its nest for the night, leaving the sky to the mayflies. I sat on the stairs with my hoody pulled up, to avoid the occasional mayfly landing in my hair. They didn’t even pause to mate: one would keep flying upright, the other would line up underneath and curl up their abdomen. Unfortunately, I don’t know which is which, but the resulting union lost its grace in flight, often hurtling down, tumbling out of the sky; at best they looked like drunken bumblebees until the two parted ways. The supple limbs of my Japanese lilac also served as a crash pad for overenthusiastic couples too otherwise-occupied to remain aloft. It was a quiet spectacle that made the evening sky hum; already, the darkness creeping in signaled the end of the show, and I’m sure their death knoll was beginning to toll. I sat, the sole witness to their lives’ singular majesty.
This morning, a single mayfly alighted by my front door knob; by tonight, it will be over for another year.
(339)
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