"he was one guy who never wanted the night to end"
Dear Donna,
We’ve had one hell of a week. Literally. Just as the UK cools down, St Louis has got even hotter. This is a disaster. It’s late September and it’s too hot for tea.
Imagine the sky has flu. Symptoms include a high temperature and extreme sweating. Patient shows marked improvement after projectile vomiting a huge thunderstorm.
This kind of weather system places St Louis in tornado alley and on the first Monday of every month at 11:00, an emergency weather siren blasts across the city. Which is normal now, but definitely wasn’t the first time we heard it and thought we were in The Blitz.
The storms are great, made even more fun when you’re living high up with big windows. But dwelling amongst the trees brings new neighbours.
Bats fly against the skyline, butterflies flutter past and a slightly dim hummingbird once flew straight into our window with a comedy ‘BOINK’.
However, when it’s this humid, it’s the insects that are livin’ it large. With the clockwork precision of pre-drinks during a season in Ibiza, the chorus of cicadas starts at 8pm every night.
From this…
To ensure they stay outside, mesh screens cover most of our windows so air can come in, but insects can’t. But what happens when you leave your bathroom window open without a mesh screen? Well, much, much bigger things get in. That make very loud noises. At 8pm every night.
I’m sitting on the loo, Alex is brushing his teeth, when suddenly a cicada shoots into the bathroom and frantically beats its very large and very noisy wings in circles above our heads.
Shoving past each other, all affection is abandoned in the name of survival. We slam the bathroom door behind us, exchange a brief look of victory, washed over by a wave of “what now?!” and “I still need the rest of that wee.”
The cicada has taken residence on our shower curtain. Realising we won’t be able to capture it on something so flimsy, I turn and see Alex has found (somewhere?) a plank of wood. Not to smash the cicada, but to flick it off the shower curtain onto a more solid surface so that we can use the old glass-and-paper trick and release it.
…to this. In ten minutes.
