Cicada Waiting.

School busses and the high school drum corps: add these to your early-morning dogwalk wheel o' sound, please. And let's go on and make it autumn, even if it'll be 143 degrees by midafternoon. Hard to see the despondent puberty-bombed fifteenish-year-old-boy waiting for the bus yesterday with a paperback of The Scarlet Pimpernel in his backpack and not think of the Toad, of what will ravage the Toad, of what his toadly sadnesses will be come this time however many years from now—fifteen, sixteen, twenty, thirty-five—but for now there's still a romance to it, an impossibleness, a far-offness. For now, the Toad fights his morning nap. He fights his swaddle. He does not fight the urge to look at Leigh Anne Whateverhernamewas in second period Spanish. Oh, but it'll come. Here's the fucked-up thing: turns out being a parent means you hope the child has that pain. It is all you can hope for. The alternative is disaster on whichever front.

In additional disaster news, the cooler weather—you know: upper eighties, little breeze—all comes crashing down around us today, even as the not-entirely-unpleasant memory of cutting drywall in the shaded driveway last night hangs on. Here's how NOAA has the next five days: 96, 96, 95, 90, 90. WXII, working with (presumably) the same material, says 96, 98, 97, 92, 89. Maybe there's a thunderstorm in the forecast. Maybe there isn't. What ANYLF can report for sure: the temps don't match the sounds of marching bands.

Cicadas, cicadas: underneath everything are the cicadas. Sometimes it sounds like life, like abundance, like unstoppableness. Other times it sounds like something heavy is arriving. The light has changed. I feel like I should say that. The light has yellowed, has slid back equinoxward from the flash-white of June. I considered ordering a fleece-lined sweatshirt this morning. Sometimes I wear long sleeves in the house just to remember what that feels like. This week I reteach myself something I already know I'm bad at: drywall seams. On the dogwalk the last two days the novel's felt more alive. When the dog and I come back to the house these mornings the Toad's just finished eating. Then the people eat, and the babies and animals watch and snort and rattle. Something is shifting in here. Some rhythm is edging toward making itself known. Or at least we think we're hearing it, maybe, sometimes, underneath everything else.