Summer is here. Gone are the long, dark, cold nights of winter; gone are the temperamental fits of spring where one day you feel the warm sun on your face and the next it’s snowing…again. We’ve watched all the usual harbingers that one after the other promised us the seasons were changing. We saw the first robins and heard the return of the song birds at dawn. Little spring peeper frogs heralded in chorus the coming of spring. The family of goslings is back in residence by the pond down the road. May begins with our yard filled with violets and ends with the forest floor covered in a blanket of white trilliums. And, at the end of the day I hear the click, click, click of the June bugs hitting the windows, attracted by the light.

I wrote the following as a tribute to the fat bugs that seem to want nothing more than to join me. It originally appeared in the Summer 2013 issue of Creative Wisconsin, a publication of the Wisconsin Writers Association.

June Bugs
By Jane Yunker

June bugs hurl fat bodies
against my bedroom windows
attracted by the light of my reading lamp
shells click and thump against glass
wings buzz desperation.

Do they want to read over my shoulder
or are they just afraid of the dark?