BACK IN SOUTHERN JERSEY
Today's heat index: 110-degrees. And so it has been here since I arrived on a red-eye flight two days ago. Southern New Jersey at its finest torture pitch. Col & I are hunkered down inside her sweet yellow house, only going outside at sundown for a wheelchair ride around the neighborhood's winding streets that are shaded by a heavy-leafed canopy of trees, mostly oaks. The high-summer sound of cicadas follows us everywhere. The sightings of lightning bugs flitting in the dark remind us of childhood when we'd capture them in glass jars where they would flicker for a while and then, Colleen remembers, their lights would go out. "We murdered them," she said. "Oh," I said back.