Summer skin

  We finally find the nerve to venture outside and take him to the park, as promised. The heat pulls out all of your energy and leaves you limp, skin salty and depleted. The desert has no use for grand plans. It is mere survival and you bend to it or adapt. But now the sun has lost it's bite and the sky is replaced with the inklings of our annual desert monsoon and so we go.
   The grass is cooling down enough to where taking off your shoes is desirable. I shed them as cicadas buzz loudly enough to penetrate your skull. It is a buzz that sounds primitive. They let their song ring and remain invisible to passing eyes. We march onward to a large sprawl of grass to live in for the next hour.
  I have fought the summers arrival every year, this year more than ever. I am depleted and the harshness that desert living can bring is more than just symbolic. It is a reality.

...you bend to it or adapt.

I am watching my son grow. I am watching myself grow. I am watching a love grow. And so things are shedding all around and a new picture is forming.

The Japanese see the cicada as a symbol of reincarnation. The Chinese have a tale wherein the multiple shedding of the cicada shell is represented as a persons breaking through stages of transformation until all their illusions have been broken and enlightenment has been achieved.

Their summer song seems louder this year.

 The monsoon will come soon and wash away the skeletons left on tree branches; and once the debris is washed away the desert will find an abundance that will make up for the silence that the cicadas will leave behind.