Many thanks to Frank at dVerse for providing this prompt for a haibun. I’ve been away too long from dVerse, and probably from writing altogether. So I appreciate any and every little bit that brings me back. Thank you Frank! We were asked to write a haibun about the solstice that our hemisphere is currently celebrating. Mine is summer.

Summer Solstice 2021

The shrill cicada song has given way to bird song. The brood x cicadas have mostly fallen, a few still linger, fly between branches sing out an unknowing goodbye. The jays, grackles, wrens who feasted on cicadas have returned to my garden to steal peanuts from the squirrels who also had disappeared only to return from dining on cicadas.

I watch as the grackles dunk the peanuts in the birdbath water, soften the outer shell, and then retrieve the silky legumes. How ingenious, I think, and then two days later on solstice watch as a crow, a regular to my garden does the same. But he is tormented by the grackles, these summer visitors who don’t know that this is his winter home. His home. I can imagine, hear, his indignation at being shunned from his winter oasis.

Just a week and a half ago, I couldn’t read on the deck, the cicada sound so massive, but now I miss it on this longest day, wondering if there will be a 17^th visitation in my future, and how 17 years ago, that was not a thought. How time doesn’t seem to matter and then it does. How this longest day, with bursts of thunder and lightning, is hallowed. How this day marks the season of nature and nurture and us remembering that not only is the earth part of us but we are but one part of the earth amongst a great congregation of others, mammals and birds and amphibians and all, knowledge from which we should never separate. But have. And, perhaps, our separation from nature is a discussion for another day/everyday.

Fireflies bright as evening falls.
Distant thunder, lightning strikes,
summer begins.