When our neighbors’ fig trees are ripe, we’re blasted with wafts of their rich, wine-like scent. It’s unmistakably potent. Then the green Japanese beetles come bumbling around knocking into things as if they were blind. The beetles like the figs too. Our neighbor, Dede, comes bearing a plastic bag of ripe fruit once a week. We eat figs daily until their purple juices leak out and the fruit flies take over. Then we, cleansing our palates on peaches that too will soon go to the fruit flies if we don’t gobble them up, wait for the next bag of figs to appear on our doorstep. We spend many an afternoon in the front yard not because the house is hot—our AC unit in the living room and newly insulated attic are sufficient—, but because it is a place to breath. We breath in the damp air after each summer rain, a rare spectacle this time of year. We sit under the canopy of our Podocarpus trees while we cradle the children on our laps and watch the lightening strike in the south. We count,