This is what sometimes happens when you blog about a topic: your brain keeps working on it long after you’ve posted, eventually prodding you awake to create an addendum.
It’s 4-something a.m. and I’m awake. I stepped around and through the hairy obstacle course of dog limbs beside the bed, my bare feet navigating carefully enough to let the sleeping dog lie. I’m drawn outside to listen to school bugs and evaluate their current performance.
Sometime after midnight, the sound changed. The school bugs are still RASP-rasping along in the dark, but the sound is muted, like the volume was turned way down, or they fell back from their original positions by a few hundred feet.
For a while, there seemed to be a first-chair school bug, RASP-rasping by itself above the background of the others. All of a sudden, it was as if someone pulled the chair out from under the first chair; it fell completely silent and has not resumed its rasping.
The sound is now watermarked on the thinning skin that separates night from morning; audible, but not nearly as in your face (in your ear?) as it was a few hours ago. It’s become the sound of the early bus stop. The melancholy end-of-summer theme song for back-to-school.
On that note–literally–I’m going back to bed.
