Beltane Summer Moon
The quiet has descended. Night falls here with few sounds other than insects and animals.
During the day nature’s biplanes, the dragonflies, swarmed, flying their graceful, darting paths through the air. I love dragonflies, they’re beautiful and a wonder of nature, but seeing them means only one thing. Mosquitoes. One of the less alluring parts of living in the humid east.
There is in each of these realizations, dragonflies = mosquitoes, for instance, a hint of knowledge that will be past. In the arid west mosquitoes and dragonflies are not part of summer. Though lack of water and intense heat are. I’m collecting these upper Midwestern home truths, ones that I’ve often ignored, as I compare daily life here with what I imagine daily life will be like later. There.
Some day, either at this computer in this study or at this computer in my new study further west, I plan to sit down and try to pick out as much of this subtle cultural knowledge as I can. Duncan, Oklahoma, by way of stories of my parents will be my first stop, then Oklahoma at large, Indiana, followed by Wisconsin and Minnesota. What are the kind of things that we know that go unremarked because they are so ordinary, so commonplace? These are the real markers of our culture.
