Cicadas and cough syrup

I was out in the garden/weed patch this afternoon, whacking the weeds away from the beans, when something rattled and buzzed LOUDLY underfoot. After I came down, I poked in that direction with the hoe, expecting a snake or something of that nature. Instead a large portly bug zoomed away, zigging and zagging as if drunk, buzzing loudly. Cicada! They just started calling yesterday, and I'd seen their exit cones in the cracks of the sidewalks at the post office. I laughed and moved on, only to startle up two more. It may be a very loud year.


Punkin has been struggling with a cough for several weeks--it finally started to break and we were trying to find her a cough syrup without all the tylenol in it, just an expectorent, which is hard. I remembered the brown bottle of my childhood. It sat on the shelf in my parents bedroom, and was only invoked for serious coughing. It had codeine in it, which sounded terribly nasty, and it lived up to our imagination and then some. It tasted horrible, smelt even worse, and burned your throat as went down. It was enough to scare you well again, and if you couldn't avoid it, you wished you would just die and be done. Seemed like that bottle never got empty over the years, and it finally occurred to me that my mother must have refilled it with whiskey as it got low. Parenting was certainly different when I was young!