Sometimes summer drains me of energy. I feel lethargic, limp, undirected, unhappy. Summer tired, summer sad.

I know bugs have a damn right to exist, but I am unhappy to see them crawl out of a cup or from underneath a book.

It is the damp that brings them and I mostly carry them outside but sometimes I kill them and then I feel ashamed I ended their little lives.

It is often grey, overcast and cool yet muggy. The air is full of the blessed, biting bugs. Everything is damp.

The news is always bad, humans are forever turning on each other. Outside, the bugs are angry and the news is always bad.

I apply for jobs and never hear back. I enter back into arguments that I swore I would never give time to again. I look back and wonder.

Decapitated mole on the driveway, dead bumble bee in the garage window.

I shepherd butterflies out of hallways, I watch for the startled bright eyes of wild animals as we dive by in our fast car.

I am trying to overcome the big sad and iron over the small sad. I hold a steaming iron and run it over the pillow case and it releases the warm, comforting smell of cotton, soothing, smoothing out the wrinkles.

Be grateful, be grateful.

Bugs have their own precious lives. They exist for a short time in the swirling energy. So do I. My existence is no more guaranteed than theirs.

It is a small squall, this mood, and will be carried away in the tide and out to sea.

I still think that every person I meet is a friend and everything is possible. I may look confident and full of energy but that it is just my irrepressible optimism lighting me from within.

I believe we can all do better, be kinder, be less self pitying. I am trying too.