I thought they had disappeared completely. When I was little, July would roll around and so would the stumbling flight of the June bug. They were easy to catch, and the pinching crawl as they wandered over the palm of your hand was slightly unsettling.
They flew in an up and sideways kind of rolling gait, like a drunk on a boat. I was never quite sure which direction they would go, but eventually, they’d land in the grass and I could scoop them up. Every now and again, I’d even find one impaled onto the barb of the barbed wire along the top of the yard fence, because evidently, they couldn’t steer even an inch to the right to avoid the danger. And why were they called June bugs, when they showed up in July?
Mom told me that when she was little, they would tie a string to the June bug’s leg and keep them for a while as a pet. This seemed like a great idea in theory, but then, seeing them struggling to fly away and escape was more than my poor heart could handle, and I would always set them free, even though there would be more than 50 lazily flying over the clover in our yard.
But twenty-some years later, when I moved back home, I no longer saw them. The yard seemed empty and quiet every July, and I wondered if they were one more casualty in Mother Nature’s fight against humanity.
Then, this week, I walked out to feed the chickens, and this huge green beetle tried to run into my forehead. No one will ever call them graceful. Suddenly, I was 5 again and I raced behind the three or four that I could easily see and waited for one of them to take a header into the tall grass. In no time, one of them nose-bombed and I captured it in between both hands.
I let it crawl for a moment, scratchy feet against my skin, the buzz of locusts and twitter of a bird in my ears, and the sun warming me into an easy sweat. I lifted my head and opened up my hands. The June bug took off, drifting down toward the grass, then around me in a lazy circle. For a moment, I was back in the childhood perfection of summer.
From Creek to River 