A selection of past posts to celebrate 10 years of Only a Blockhead. The rainy season was declared over a week ago. School is out. It is officially summer.
It is hot and humid. Sweat beads on the skin with the slightest exertion. The first cicadas are hissing in the heat of the day. Plants, weeds and creepers are in a flush of summer growth.
a child's baseball floats
forgotten in the
furiously growing rice
(2008)
The flooded paddies bring pairs of brown ducks to the valley to feast on weed and insects. Sated, they preen or rest on the low banks that have been mown of their weeds. Swallows wheel over the young rice, catching insects on the wing.
The half moon hung in a clear sky after sunset. To look up at it was to see the wheeling bats high above the paddy fields, feasting in the insect-rich air. Late last night cycling home, I was--surely there's no other explanation--hit with a light, glancing blow in the shoulder by a bat not paying attention
We met a father and his two young sons coming out of the woods, towels tied around their heads, on their way back from an expedition to find large shiny black newly-hatched kabuto mushi helmet beetles to be kept as pets in plastic cages where they gorge on watermelon rind and are in turn fodder for entries in summer homework diaries
(2007)
By day, cicadas
By night, frogs in the paddies
The sounds of summer
(2009)
--Julian