There are spittlebugs in July’s alfalfa and flowerless tansies. And there’s a memory in the spittlebugs of a country boy and a hay field, the dew-soaked morning after a first quarter moon.
Today’s summer breeze plays once again on the tall grasses. It plays like the breeze through the fields of my boyhood days, the bobolink’s rolling notes riding the waves I still feel.
And the wild roses that begged the fence line for bit of space have now surrendered in darkened, fallen petals, giving way to potato vine, cocklebur and prickly ash … Which I cut and hope the bitter smell provides some respite from mosquitos.
It’s early July again, as cluttered in green as my mind in worry. A month of new beginnings for prairie plants and fledglings of the grassland birds. I should know this, and let the wild columbine nod away my fear.
Fear should be lost in the small bush hiding the white sparrow’s low nest. Or lost in reverie of a creek gone dry, where frogs once rippled the water, of fields of meadowlarks and in my teasing of killdeers as I briefly claimed the pasture as my own.
And when I was a boy I saw spittlebugs in the fields of green. I knew not what they were, only that it was July and breezy, warm freedom. I know spittlebugs today, but too often look past what I feel and see.
Glad to know it doesn’t harm the plants.