Rites of (a Late Midwest) Spring
Early, piercing sunlight, tearing like a rocket through the cool morning sky to heat up the ground and beckon through translucent cotton curtains.
The staccato-turned-crescendo of the trees’ feathered choirs, weaving a morning melody that morphs into a rainless thunder.
The familiar smell of grocery aisle coffee, filling up the kitchen and spreading its fingers down the carpeted hall to coax the house’s tired inhabitants out of their beds.
Red plastic gasoline cans, dusty and depleted, ready to pour a fiery libation down the aluminum confines of a push mower’s pistons.
The collective roar of the street’s dozen dads, pruning their lawns and piloting their metal steeds up and down cropless fields, line after line.
Fresh gut grass wrestling with the scent of jet black asphalt and clean-cut lumber; new ground, new road, and new fencing jockeying for control of the neighborhood’s noses.
Musty brown paper bags, siloes full of yellowed grass clippings and powdered leaves left from Fall, baking in the front corner of the garage.
Sunbleached green rubber hoses, reluctant to uncoil after a long hibernation, coaxed into a straight line by a warm rush of spicket water that gushes from the hard crack of the faucet’s first turn.
The razor edge of clear plastic popsicles, cutting the corners of an expectant grin to deliver icy fruit and corn syrup that melts fast, rushing down throats and over hands.
Kamikaze honeybees, zipping too close to an ear, smug in the resulting recoil and disdainful of their slow, bumbling cousins.
A citronella candle denied shelter after last night’s dinner, flooded with stagnant rainwater and swollen mosquitoes, barely evaporating into the humid air.
Old, caked carbon from grilled cuts of chicken, pork, and beef — scraped off as an offering to the propane flames, reignited for the first time this season.
The cold snap of a stolen chocolate bar, separated from s’more stock and hastily scarfed down in front of the warm wave of a campfire.
A slowly setting sun, exhausted from it’s marathon run across the cloudless firmament, still hesitant to say “Good night.”
The gentle rise of the evening’s cacophonous symphony: a percussive rattle of cicadas, mellowed out by the crickets’ flute-like accompaniment and the bass roar of a bachelor bullfrog.
The night’s final entertainment: a thousand lightning bugs, dancing around the newly cut lawn, firing off in a rapid display of stellar excitement; the infinitely distant stars’ nocturnal descent onto suburban backyards.
