After my usual Friday night at the Brown Lantern Bar in Live Oak, and then my Saturday morning sleep-in, I got up and went for a run.
My most common route is to jog about a mile and a half south down highway 129, to where the sidewalk ends heading out of town. At that point, the road becomes two lane through the swamps, woods and farm fields for twenty-five miles or so until you reach Branford, an even smaller town than Live Oak, at the southern end of Suwannee County. I turn around and come back when the sidewalk ends, though, which makes for approximately three miles total that I jog.
On this day, I noticed that many love bugs were flying about. They hit me in my face, chest and arms as I ran. I made note of the time of year- early September- and it reminded me of the first time that I had ever seen bugs like that.
It was the beginning of the fall semester at Florida State Law in Tallahassee, 2008.
These bugs were freaky looking to me then. Two were attached to each other, flying in different directions and unable to separate. I asked someone (I cannot remember whom) what they were, and was told that the government had synthetically designed them be mosquito eaters. The design did not go as planned, though, and the two-headed creatures escaped to multiply and multiply.
I actually believed the story and repeated it a few times before I looked them up on line and found out otherwise- that they were common "love bugs."
While the creatures sort of got in the way during my run on Saturday, they also brought back a pleasant memory.
The fall of 2008 was an exciting time for me. It was the start of a great three years of school, a new city, and a lot of new people. The bugs were everywhere in September 2008 in Tallahassee, but they were just part of new and fun experience- like Spanish Moss in the oak trees, or orange palm tree fruit, or Florida State football. I did not mind them in September of 2008, or in September of 2013.
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