As I sat in a stuffy office park yesterday afternoon, trying to focus on the computer screen in front of me, all I could wrap my brain around was the incessant sound of a little insect, chirping its vibratory call through the panes of glass that failed to keep the outdoors out.
As the cicadas hummed their waxing and waning tune, the work at hand began fading in lieu of a reminiscent image from my youth.
Long shadows stretch across the August lawn, as a young boy stretches his wiry limbs through the cool grass. The verdant blades are showing the incipience of seeds, despite the mother of the boy and her persistent calls for a gas-powered solution to a grasshoppers paradise.
The sugar maples are ablaze with crimson and fuchsia in the front yard, and the oak trees are sending off dry sepia helicopters by the gravel alleyway that borders the back.
As time drags an orange sun beneath the horizon, the boy realizes that he cannot remain supine in this neglect-propagated meadow forever. While his two arms remain folded behind his head, two analogous arms on some unseen eternal clock move him further into the inevitable future of learning, growing, failing, loving, stretching, loathing, and succeeding.
And I'm back in a sterile office park, still trying to focus on the task at hand. Whether it's success or failure, I may never know.
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