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July 7 - July 21, 2025
I know I will search for fireflies all the rest of my days, even though they dwindle a little bit more each year. I can’t help it. They blink on and off, a lime glow to the summer night air, as if to say: I am still here, you are still here, I am still here, you are still here, I am, you are, over and over again. Perhaps I can will it to be true.
wrists. All the boys I crushed on could break-dance. The only things I knew of Kansas were Dorothy and the Wizard and tornados pointing their creepy fingers all over the state.
If a white girl tries to tell you what your brown skin can and cannot wear for makeup, just remember the smile of an axolotl. The best thing to do in that moment is to just smile and smile, even if your smile is thin. The tighter your smile, the tougher you become. Give them a salamander smile.
But even from that brief application, you fell in love with and slightly feared that slash of red, a cardinal out of the corner of your eye, lending definition to the outline of your mouth. A mouth that was used to speaking only when called upon. A mouth that stayed shut when you knew the answer because you didn’t want anyone to roll their eyes or mutter Teacher’s pet! like they had in years prior. Instead, you wiped off the red lipstick with wadded-up toilet paper and forced a smile, leaving the locker room with a pale, cotton candy–colored lipstick that made you look wan and parched instead.
One can cut off various parts of arms and legs a hundred times, and every time: the smile and a bloom of arm spring forth like a new perennial.
Particularly devastating about these amphibians is the fact that the people who created the International Union for Conservation of Nature have determined there are no more axolotls in the wild. None! Wild axolotls used to swim in abundance in two particular lakes in Mexico, but there haven’t been any documented cases of finding wild axolotls since 2013.
And when it eats—what a wild mess—when it gathers a tangle of bloodworms into its mouth, you will understand how a galaxy first learns to spin in the dark, and how it begins to grow and grow.
Frogs are the great bioindicators of this planet—meaning the health of dancing frogs is indicative of the health of the biosphere itself. That’s a bit of promising news to come out of one of the most gorgeous places on earth, where the cool streams flow along the base of the Ghat mountain range in southwestern India. And for now, I’m just so tickled to know these little ones exist, foot-flagging on a shade-cooled rock, tapping their way together toward a rush of pebble, water, wind.
If you could smell the wind off the wings of an ecstatic, teeny bat—if you could smell banana leaves drooping low and modest into the ruddy soil—if you could inhale clouds whirring so fast across the sky—that is what monsoon rain smells like.
When the rain stops, terrific smells issue forth—the kind that would make people at a food festival steam and sweat with envy—from curried eggs, thick steaks of broiled fish in coconut milk, chili chicken, payasam noodle puddings, and sweet honey bricks of hulva cooling on wooden tables.
This was a man who’d be happy when I bloomed. Seven months later, on the cusp of strawberry season, our friends threw coral-colored rose petals over us as we exited the church, husband and wife.
July A blue jay gossips at my window. I nod my head, Yes, yes. Is that so?
August Apple aphids attack my cherry tree, but I am back to some semblance of a writing schedule. We work in shifts, my husband and I. He takes mornings; I am afternoons. I pick blueberries with the baby strapped to my chest, and the lines come to me. Sometimes, if I am lucky, I will remember them when I sit down to write later that day. Mostly, they remain snagged and tangled on the berry branch.
November After a month of readings in Seattle and New York, I am full again. I have two or three small notebooks in my purse at any given time, and it is time to turn the scribbles into stanzas. The last blister beetle, which has vexed me all summer, falls from my dahlias and kicks his leg in a cycling motion. He turns into a midnight-blue shell, crisping in the mulch.
January The writing is slow but steady. My friends speak of raising chickens once this long winter is over. I wonder about alectryomancy, writing by divination. A white hen is set near a board divided into twenty-six segments. You place grain on each segment, then take down what words are spelled out when the hen eats the grain. On my worst writing days, that’s what writing a poem feels like. Only I am not the hen. I am the grain.
February My son makes his first snow angel, a tiny asterisk in the yard.
When I get back, I wear my son against my chest around the house and on errands. I need his heartbeat right on top of mine again. I refrain from snipping any of the snowdrops that bloomed while I was gone. I let them stay.
whale sharks only eat plankton and bits of shrimp, and their throats are the size of a quarter—but
It was as if she was toying with me—wanting to frighten me just enough to let me know exactly who was queen of this tank. The shark repeated her close encounters with me several more times during my snorkel session, even though there were five other snorkelers and two dive masters in the tank. Each time, I watched her giant eyeball, curious as a spaniel’s, turn toward my mask. Very rare to happen at all, let alone to the same person, said the dive master.
In Mississippi, summer means mosquito. It also means tomatoes, means mosquito, means peaches, means humidity, means strawberries, and means mosquito. Mostly mosquito. I just counted five while sitting here on my deck, having a coffee at seven-thirty in the morning.
Potoos are one of the few birds that never build a nest—males and females take turns warming a single white egg with purple spots settled in a divot of a tree branch. When the baby is born, its feathers are pure white, and when it gets too large to safely hide under a parent, it learns how to freeze just so to resemble a patch of white mushrooms.
After my kids could finally eat solid foods, one of her greatest pleasures was hand-feeding them slices of fresh citrus—all the white threads lovingly pulled off for a sweet bite.
There’s a lovely cocktail, perfect for the summer, that I like to make on the rare occasion we find dragon fruit in our local supermarket: slice and remove the skin of one dragon fruit and blend the flesh with one-third of a cup of vodka, a dash of freshly squeezed lime juice, and a quarter cup of coconut milk. Toss in a few ice cubes to make the glass sweat. Garnish with an edge of extra dragon fruit for a tropical touch.
Under a brilliant moon, and unbeknownst to us, the darkened world silvers and shimmers from pink and ebony wings, a small thunder. We can’t possibly hear such an astonishing wind while we try to keep in step with our small dances on this earth. But we should try. We should try.
If I turned off a lamp, and whispered that it was time to sleep, and slowly let my eyes adjust to the darkness, I would see him still staring at me with eyes as big as malted milk balls in our moonlit room. His pouty mouth parted in a perpetual state of delight. His wispy eyebrows and fine spread of owl-feather hair. The only time he didn’t wear that expression of wonderment was when he blessedly fell asleep, so rare in those early years. But oh—when that finally did happen—how he’d sleep so hard against my chest! We’d both wake in a light sweat, although we were in the middle of a
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Perhaps it is because of these whispered nocturnal adventures during the first years of his life that my son’s expressions regularly resemble those of a ribbon eel. Especially here in Mississippi, when our days are mostly spent outside, and it’s all: Mommy! Look at me! Watch this!Mommy, watch me hit a home run! Mommy, did you see that frog? Look! Did you see how high I can jump? A hummingbird! Mommy! When you see a ribbon eel swim, its very expression says, Look!Look at me!Look at that crunchy shrimp!
The one and only time he has ever gotten in trouble at school, in the entirety of his tender twelve years, was when a classmate told him that only girls could like butterflies. So he did what any butterfly-loving person would do: he said, Shut up, stupidface.
In their driveway, my dad now teaches his grandsons how to find constellations, too. The trick to finding constellations is to let your eyes adjust to all that dark. Scientists refer to this as dark adaptation. Give them at least thirty minutes to get accustomed to the night sky. If you want to find Pegasus, look for that distinctive square—the plump belly of the horse—look up, look up. The winged horse still flies there without ever losing a feather—over you and me, and all the seas.
I can’t help but break into a sunny smile when I say the various nicknames for dandelions out loud: Dogposy. Clockflower. Live-longs. Fortune-teller plant. Bessyclock. Witch gowan. Swine’s snout. Tell-time. Lion’s tooth. Bumpipe. Heartfever grass.
If you find enough yellow florets—four cups of packed petals, to be exact—you can make a jelly that rings a sweetness in your mouth a little like fresh honey. If you can only gather up eighty or so, dip them in egg and flour and fry them in hot oil. Dust them with a touch of paprika and cayenne, and you have yourself a fine, fragrant, crunchy snack.
From myths and the crackle-candy of fairy tales, I was taught to fear night.
Forgive me if I wanted to return safely. Safety was never given to me. My safety outdoors as a brown girl was never a given.
And if you crush these blue blooms and mix them with a bit of alum, you will create the loveliest blue ink. A page of night words to whisper, perhaps, that a garden is in your future?
Because no matter what, you are not alone, not with ten quintillion insects on this planet and 390,900 plants known to science—no, you are most certainly not alone in this rich and dark dirt.
It is this way with wonder: it takes a bit of patience, and it takes putting yourself in the right place at the right time. It requires that we be curious enough to forgo our small distractions in order to find the world.
Did you see that? A single firefly is, too. Such a tiny light, for such a considerable task. Its luminescence could very well be the spark that reminds us to make a most necessary turn—a shift and a swing and a switch—toward cherishing this magnificent and wondrous planet.
