Firefly Season
“I’ve got a message for you,” the old woman drawls. She appears to be in her late 70s, and she’s wearing an oversized purple t-shirt and a floor-length floral-print skirt. She looks at me through rimless glasses, her shoulder-length steel gray hair tied up in a pony tail. A second ago, we almost ran into each other as we both rounded the corner with our fully-laden carts from our respective frozen food aisles at the Food Lion.
Oddly, she looks a little like photos I’ve seen of my great grandmother.
“What’s that?” I ask, genuinely curious what message she, a perfect stranger, could have for me.
“Jesus is coming.”
She says it so matter-of-factly, it’s like she’s delivering a postcard. I think about the mid-aisle near collision and my mouth fires off a response before my brain is done considering it.
“Thank you ma’am,” I say, “but I’m glad I didn’t meet him just now.”
“Me too,” she laughs, her voice fading in a doppler effect, as she walks the other way without looking back.
I was glad she understood it was a context joke, and not just me making fun of her random supermarket apocalypticism.
I tend to take the long drive orders these days. The ones that go 20 or 30 miles. Sometimes even more. If the pay is right, they’re basically subsidizing my need to drive, and see the beautiful countryside, and think. North Carolina is a gorgeous state. One of the prettiest I’ve seen. Increasingly, I find that although the work I care about most is done at my desk, I hate being cooped up all the time. I want to be out seeing the world, listening to books, thinking my life through, not staring at a glowing screen inside an apartment that feels more like a cave.
I drop off a prescription to a plump, pleasant man at a house in the country. I’m required to check his ID, and as I look at his birthdate, I note with chagrin that he seems too old to be not-quite-my-father’s age. He’s wearing a tucked-in gray t-shirt and khakis pulled up too high, belted around the widest part of his spherical belly. It reminds me of children’s book illustrations of Humpty Dumpty. But I genuinely like the man, and we get to talking on his front stoop. He’s warm and intelligent and kind. As we talk, I make some comment about how I never expected to be delivering groceries at 48, which leads to us stumbling into a discussion of lost paths and failed marriages. He tells me a little about his first wife, and how they split after over 20 years. He gave her the house and a car, but it wasn’t enough for her. She wanted to destroy him, he says with a laugh.
“But I don’t wish her any harm,” he said. “I loved her for a long time. I wanted to make sure she was taken care of.”
He says that his second wife is his soulmate, and that he treats her children and grandchildren as though they are his own. Just then, she yells at him from the living room to close the front door, because it’s 90-some degrees out and he’s letting all the air conditioning out. From where I’m standing on the outside, she doesn’t come across as anyone’s soulmate, but I can tell by the way he speaks about her, and the way he loves to spoil the grandchildren that aren’t even his own blood, that he sees something very different. His words are shaped by a glowing smile, and I know he means every word of it.
As we speak, I notice my first dragonfly of the season land on the white-painted brick near his front door. A little punctuation mark for a conversation that does little to assuage my sorrow, but registers as a real human interaction at a time when I have too few of those.
As the weeks go on, I see precious few of my little flying harbingers of metamorphosis, but when I do, it always seems to come at a moment where I’m knee deep in grief, inasmuch as many of my car rides serve as protracted sessions of personal excavation. And since their oddly specific cameos keep happening at a time of year when they should be plentiful but are almost nowhere to be seen, each visit feels like a pointed reminder that I need to stay on this path, even though it’s brutal and I don’t know where it’s going. On one particular day, when I could barely keep my head on straight enough to work, I wound up stuck behind a woman in Costco, only to notice that she had a big dragonfly tattooed on the back of her left arm. It was the only visible ink she had.
I had to laugh.
As for the real dragonflies, I don’t know if their scarcity this year has to do with the heat this summer, or if it’s something else, but Raleigh’s been a furnace since the beginning of June. Fortunately, I made friends with a man named Seven, the maintenance supervisor for my complex, and he made sure my old rusted-out HVAC system got replaced in May. My electric bills immediately dropped, and instead of sounding like a jet engine kicking on, it now registers as barely a whisper.
There’s a man in the Wegmans’ ice cream aisle who is dressed like a woman, and he has a young boy in the child seat of his cart. I feel an immediate irritation. I don’t know how to react. It’s bad enough when they’re caught in their own delusion, but bringing a four year old into it feels like a kind of cruelty that shouldn’t be tolerated. My thoughts race. Should I say something? Should I ignore it? I’m working. What good will it do? What power do I have to change the madness that has spread through our world? I force myself to stay focused on my task, feeling like a coward, but knowing there’s no version of an interaction I could have that wouldn’t make things worse.
A gaunt woman who looks and sounds like she’s smoked herself very nearly into mummification is haranguing her exhausted husband in the dairy aisle. “You got beans and vegetables but no plan?!” she says, loudly enough for everyone to hear. “You’ve got no strategy!” He tries to avoid looking at her. I get the feeling that he wishes he could be anywhere else but near her acid tongue.
A black man in a baseball cap who looks to be in his 30s is standing near the frozen vegetables with a huge bouquet of roses in his hand.
“What did you do?” I ask through a smile. His laugh comes instantly, deep and rueful, but he doesn’t say a word. He knows I know. Men don’t need to discuss this particular version of hell. We all know exactly what it feels like. Words are superfluous.
On an overcast Sunday, I drop off an order at the door of a lovely two-story home in midtown, but since there’s wine in the order, I have to check ID. I ring the doorbell, but it takes a while before anyone answers. The woman who finally comes to the door is about my age, blonde, with a pretty face, wearing a black cardigan and a cream colored dress with orange flowers on it. She has the kind of sweet Southern drawl you only hear in the Carolinas.
