Summer can be lonely in Austin. Everyone is travelling to get out of the heat and it feels like we should too. It feels a little wrong to be moving through these 100 degree days. Still, here we are. The pools and springs are cold and lovely but by the end of June I’ve grown tired of them, leaving two more months of what is essentially winter in the north – laying on the couch, watching movies, tolerating it as best we can with evening and morning activities. Starting the car before we get in to cool it down.
I have a secret love affair with summer here. With so many people gone or rushing from one air-conditioned space to another, there are a thousand little beautiful things people miss. On an open field, the purple martins swoop down and around like stunt planes, eating little bugs. And big red dragonflies fill the air too, lazily circling each other. Neon skimmers. In Spanish they are caballitos del diablo, little horses of the devil. When sun is blazing in a cloudless sky, it feels appropriate to be surrounded by the devil’s horses, galloping through the sticky air in their eternal spirals.
In the summer the nights are lovely and balmy and occasionally breezy and mosquitoless. It’s beautiful for sitting on the front porch in a tank top, with an iced tea or tequila as the cicadas finally start to quiet down and the lightning bugs shimmer in the tall grass. This week I was out at dark and noticed a bird on the electric wire, slightly bigger than a mourning dove; a screech owl. I watched it fly silently from there to the roof and back and forth a few times from our roof to the neighbor’s. The sweet sad cries they save for winter, in the summer they hunt. Lizards and snakes and mice. More of hell’s favorite creatures.
In a few months, you’ll start kindergarten. I still can’t believe it, how we’ve gotten through five summers already together, and you are no longer a baby, being pulled around on a floaty in the Pedernales, or toddling through the baby pool at Shipe. The lazy days of wearing you out and crashing on the porch with a beer before sundown are gone. Now you’re nearly swimming on your own, you have ideas and make choices, and you’re always ready for more. You want to hunt for fossils. In the middle of the day, in the rocky, waterless creek. At Barton Springs, you saw a sign about the salamanders and asked exactly where they live. You spent the rest of the time trying to discover one, so frustrated when I told you they are too deep down and too small to see easily.
Fantastically, you “already know” karate, and spend a lot of time showing me your moves. They are brilliantly unrealistic but the energy is convincing. When you graduated from pre-school last month, they gave you a cape and you wore it all week, not completely trusting me when I told you it wasn’t a requirement of your new status. It’s a little jarring, the stifling heat on one hand, and you wanting to go full speed ahead in each moment on the other. I feel myself trying to catch up, and resisting a little too. Slow down, little man, slow down. Take your time, look at those little horses. I know you can’t and shouldn’t, but how I wish you could.
Little Bug 