Small Ending

I am at that point I reach every spring and fall — I am tired of the intensity of the season and ready for change. This has been a dank late summer, and I feel worn and beaten in several ways.

Sitting outside in what writer John Graves would have called the “damp, malarial windlessness” of early September, I was reading and listening to the bagpipe drone of the locusts. I felt a tickle, and then things moved with speed and finality.

Small Ending

Red wasp on my leg

Preoccupied, I swatted –

A reflex, a death.

~ S.K. Orr