We will be hot today. It will reach 82°. Partly cloudy is also predicted, but right now it is totally cloudy. Earlier, the sun was here for a bit, and I figure it will be back. A breeze is blowing from the south. I can feel it all the way down the hall from the back door. I hope it stays around.

When I was a kid, my father was a mighty hunter. Armed with only a magazine, he hunted and attacked Mosquitos. I remember him standing on my bed trying to kill the mosquitos on the ceiling. The mattress was rocked as he move up and down the bed. That I was trying to sleep was no nevermind. His prey directed his movements. The ceiling in my room gave evidence of his successes. Blotches of his victims dotted the ceiling, even spots of blood, evidence of mosquitos having found their targets and of my father having found them.

My mother kept a fly Swatter around. It was one of those with a thin metal handle and a square of flexible plastic at the end of it. Flies were tricky. Because they sensed that swatter and flew off, technique was important. You had to slowly lift the swatter and flick the end at the fly, sort of as if you had a whip. We preferred to stun the flies, not out of any sense of guilt at their demise by our hands but because we had a turtle, a Woolworth’s turtle which lived for years in a plastic home with a palm tree on our kitchen counter. It loved the stunned flies which sort of hopped across the water in his bowl. We’d watch the turtle chase, catch the fly and dine.

Behind and below the houses on my street was a field. In the summer it had tall brown grass. We used to take a jar, bang air holes in the cover and run across the field catching grasshoppers in the air as they jumped in front of us. We’d try to catch as many as we could in the jar. They were brown grasshoppers. We never kept them. We let them go after the hunt.

Spiders have never scared me. I don’t get why some people, seemingly mostly women, are afraid of them. Maybe Little Miss Muffet is the cause. Only two, the black widow and the brown recluse, out of 614 species in the United States, are harmful to humans (I had to look that up). The rest eat insects which would otherwise consume our crops. In August my house is an incubator of sorts. Baby spiders emerge and weave the tiniest webs usually on window panes. They remind me of Wilbur saved by Charlotte and of the generations of Charlotte’s offspring who kept him company over the years.