Termite Season.

It’s termite season again. Termites only seem to come out at night here in São Paulo, like disappointing vampires. But what they lose in fright potential, they make up for in volume. Each night a few thousand of them congregate around every outdoor electric light in a city which is a huge constellated field of electric lights, millions upon millions of them. Once they’ve found their particular spot – the light of their life, so to speak – they don’t do very much apart from dive bomb each other and whirl around the nucleus of light in great flickering, slow-mo flurries. In the morning their wings form glistening drifts of translucent lace which, if wings were diamonds, would create ten million millionaires overnight. But, this not being the case, we simply fetch the dust-pan and brush each morning and start sweeping them up from where they’ve heaped against the skirting board and under the table, chasing after the skittering whorls and eddies, taking the pan-full of fallen gems out to the kitchen and shaking them into the bin.