Here, late in August, when even the bean fields are heavy with pods, it is blossoms that I want, not the fruit of the season, not the acorns
and buckeyes that the squirrels are carrying off. I want nectar, the death-defying food of the gods, honeydew, or the distilled winelike sap of apples
and pears, anything intoxicating enough to make an insect eat in spite of summer storms, three days of wind and cold, enough to blow us all off course.
Trapped indoors, twelve, fourteen, now sixteen monarchs cling to the mesh in the far corner of the cage where the sun last appeared.
I’ve exhausted my garden, already raided the parks, brought home coneflowers and daisies, clover and black-eyed Susans.
Pulling on muck boots, I drive to the ditches looking for goldenrod, and blue-eyed grass— all the stuff that makes my family sneeze.
I want the best that the earth has to offer, not the produce, but the promise of immortality, that these butterflies, through their children
and grandchildren, will live forever, will fly away and rise again among the Texas bluebells, will mate and return to us each spring. I crush an orange,
garnish it with flowers, set a butterfly on the sticky rim of the saucer. I roll out her proboscis until it touches the sweetness, and she drinks.
What monsoon can do is give you sweetness in spite of the heavy wet. Even when it rains in Kerala, India, people still ride their colorful scooters, and some even carry a friend or a love along with them. If it is a woman behind the driver, she will sit sidesaddle, wrapped in her sari or churidar. One hand grips only the padded rim of the seat for support, the other holds a black umbrella covering herself and the driver. The thwap-thwap-thwap of raindrops the size of quarters and the scooter’s engine—the only sounds worth noticing on their damp course through the village streets.
This rain is never scary, though, even during monsoon. You can tell monsoon is near when you hear a sound like someone shaking a packet of seeds in the distance. A pause—and then the roar. You know it’s coming when the butterflies—fire skippers and bluebottles—fly in abundance over my grandmother’s cinnamon plants and suddenly vanish. A whole family of peacocks will gather up in a banyan tree, so still, as if posing for a seasonal portrait. Then the shaking sound begins.
If you could smell the wind from an ecstatic, teeny bat—if you could smell banana leaves drooping low and modest into the ruddy soil, if you could inhale clouds whirring so fast across the sky—that is what monsoon rain smells like.
