July Chores

Today’s heat gifts me memory. Nana’s crepe myrtles guarding the car port, gallon buckets half-filled with warm hose water and dollar tree dish soap. My siblings and I picking june bugs like fruit, barbed legs gripping and pinching our sweaty fingers in vain. Shaking them off into the soapy water, jewels left to wriggle and spin with their kin, jade vests competing with the bubble’s opalescence. That Baptist church sitting quiet right behind us, a witness to our smiting of creatures making love in the wrong flowers.