A Mayfly

The times continue to be interesting.

I keep thinking about what story a historian would make out of my life and times one day. I wonder if any future historian could ever convey to  a class of future students how surreal it feels to be an American just now. Maybe it’s different in more exciting parts of the country,  but right here, where the rust belt collides with the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, it’s only surreal.

Here in Steubenville, around town, talking to my neighbors and running my errands, life goes on much the same way. It’s getting rather expensive, that’s all. One of those big 60-packs of white eggs is nearly thirty dollars. But all over the news, I see my country mutating, turning into something much worse than it was, escalating towards a crisis that may ruin us entirely. It feels like my little corner of Ohio is shrinking further and further away from the entire rest of the world.

I wonder how long things will go on seeming normal, before the Ohio Valley really starts to feel chaos. Maybe weeks. Maybe a year. Maybe everything will go on this way indefinitely and I’ll look silly for having worried, but I doubt it. It feels like the crash will come any time now. A day or two, and our world will come to an end.

My friends in other countries are being kinder than I have a right to expect, considering how my country is bullying them. I am particularly grateful to my friends in Canada. They are gracious and understanding in that Canadian way. We get together to play Dungeons and Dragons in a Facebook group or a Discord once a week, and try not to think about real life.

Canada seems so far away, but it’s really not.

When I was a little girl, my family would go up to Lakeside in Marblehead for vacations by Lake Erie. This is what people from Ohio call “going to the beach.” We’d rent a lake house a few blocks from the water and spend the day swimming. Sometimes, we’d go and see the famous Marblehead lighthouse, and play on those funny white limestone shelves of rock that look like a set from a fantasy film. Sometimes we’d take the ferry out to Kelley’s Island, the northernmost part of Ohio– just near Pelee Island, Ontario.

Once in awhile, when the wind was right, an enormous cloud of Mayflies would blow south across Lake Erie and affix themselves to every surface. They would cover the clapboard siding of the vacation cottages and the awnings of the picnic tables, and then they’d die. Mayflies only live for about a day once they’ve got their wings. But when they died, they’d stay at attention with their feet clinging to the siding, and their long cerci standing erect. People used to brush them off the houses with brooms. The live ones would flutter around for a moment before settling back on the siding. The dead ones would land on the street, looking a bit like raked leaves.

My father, my uncle, and my grandmother called the mayflies “Canadian soldiers.” That was the name that most of the people up by the lake called the insects. I didn’t even know they were really called mayflies until later. I didn’t even realize that the name “Canadian soldiers” was a joke derived from the fact that they were an army that invaded from up north.

You can see Perry’s Monument from the Lakeside pier when it isn’t cloudy, because that’s just near the place where Commodore Perry won the Battle of Lake Erie against a real military coming down from Canada. Sometimes I would play in the city park near the lake, and pretend to be shooting off the ornamental cannons, to protect Lakeside.

There was also a concrete cube-shaped structure on the edge of the water with some kind of replica Liberty Bell on top of it, and the structure itself was hollow. My siblings and I discovered a crack in the concrete one evening, and had a fine time making the inside into our “secret hideout.” I pretended that I was a brave resistance fighter like the Johansen family in Number the Stars, hiding my neighbors from the Nazis inside the foundation of the bell. I planned to keep them hidden there until after dark, then commandeer one of those rowboats they were renting by the pier. I’d sneak them all out of the secret hideout in the middle of the night, and start rowing. Before long we’d be in Canadian waters and could wave down a coast guard ship for rescue. Such a fun game to play on a warm summer evening, two and a half decades ago, when I believed that all the Nazis were dead and gone.

I’ve had that memory bouncing in my head for days.

It feels so different now.

If anyone writes about how this time in history seemed, I hope they say that it felt surreal. I hope they say that it felt as if my own part of the country was steadily shrinking away from every other place on earth. I hope somebody writes that the memories of games we played as children suddenly seemed ominous.

The suspense was terrible.

We worried day and night.

A day or two, the lifespan of a mayfly, and the world may come to an end.