August 12, 2025

it’s blueberry season

but I can’t get my mind off the damselfly that landed on my ankle long enough
for me to take a photograph, how when I zoomed in later it looked like he or
she had planets for eyes. I was eating a cheese sandwich with slices of heirloom
tomato and dabs of mayonnaise. I was sitting on a sloped rock on the east end
of a pond I’d just gone swimming in, wearing a two-piece bathing suit
patterned geometrically in red and white. There were chocolate peanut-butter
cups in the vicinity, and an open can of cherry seltzer. I imagined these
the reasons a thin-framed creature would alight on a human leg. It didn’t occur
how specific I was about the probable reasons for a damselfly’s landing and
how nonspecific I was about my own improbable leg, which I had left
uncovered, perhaps, for just this very moment, on this particular day when
someone else was hunched in a field somewhere filling a square cardboard carton
with the season’s first fruit and I was the fruit whose season had finally arrived.