Cicada Overture

As mid-summer heat builds, the cicadas are tuning up, their oddly metallic chirring erupting in bursts, rising and falling. I listen to the sounds that so identify summer for me, that evoke past summers in my childhood, when air conditioning was only for businesses and theaters. At home we had electric fans strategically placed about the house, and we children drifted off to sleep surrounded by the hard-edged sussuration of cicadas.

I was speaking tonight with an acquaintance who hails from Mississippi, and we compared notes on pre-A/C Southern Life. Being from Mississippi, the young man could top any story of heat that I could offer. I have been to Mississippi to visit my sister a number of times in the past twenty years, so I have a glimmering of an idea of what real heat is. As my sister says, though, “Y’all, we do have air conditioning now in Mississippi.” Grateful thanks ascend from visiting family for that healing fact.

Nostalgia softens memory, and makes the associations attendant on the cicada concert happy ones.

Easing Summer’s Grip

During the hottest part of Summer, generally from early July on through mid-August, the “dog days” bear down with heat and haze, making me wish for October. Summer is sweat, bugs and heat rash for me. Overnight, a cool front dropped the morning temperatures, only eight degrees or so, but combined with a lower humidity and a cleansing of the particulate-heavy air, walking the dog this morning was pleasurable, instead of oppressively hot and sweaty.

The term “dog days” refers to the ascendancy of the star Sirius, known as the Dog Star to the Greeks and Romans. Depending on the latitude at which you live, Sirius sinks below the horizon for another year somewhere in mid-August to early September. So perhaps Sirius is taking some of the heat with it in the next week or so. Whatever the cause, I am grateful. I know that plenty of heat remains in the weeks ahead, but it is nice to have a little taste of what may come soon.

I notice also the beginning leaf fall of some trees in my neighborhood. Not the big trees, but some of the smaller ones, have contributed skimpy drifts of dry leaves to cover walks and driveways, and the edges of roadways. Very few so far, perhaps the early fall of leaves has more to do with the continuing drought than with seasonal rhythms. The cicadas still scream all day and night, and even today the high will be past the mid-point of the eighties, but hope is stirring in my cold blood, remembering in the buried genes of fjord dwellers and dark northern forest hunters the crisp and bracing days of Autumn.

Let it come.

Summer Nights

Another July has rolled around, with heat, humidity and memories of summers past. I have written here of the sounds of summer, especially nights on the sleeping porch of my grandfather’s farm house, when the crescendo of cicadas around the house walled in my sisters and me, as we fell into sweaty sleep.

I was today reading the opening description by James Agee of another summer, this one in Knoxville in 1915. The passage describes the neighborhood in which he grew up, and the summer evenings after supper when fathers watered their lawns with garden hoses, while their wives and children sat on the front porches, trying to stay cool. The passage is the prologue or introduction to Agee’s posthumous novel, A Death in the Family, an autobiographical account of the death of his father. Left in disorganized form, the novel was shaped into its present form by Agee’s editor. The description of summer 1915 in Knoxville was placed as a prologue because it seemed to fit nowhere else. Reading it, I realized that summer nights in the south were never more minutely or eloquently described before or since.

The sound of the cicadas (Agee calls them “locusts”) I will quote here:

The noise of the locust is dry, and it seems not to be rasped or vibrated but urged from him as if through a small orifice by a breath that can never give out. Also, there is never one locust but an illusion of at least a thousand. The noise of each locust is pitched in some classic locust range out of which none of them varies more than two full tones: and yet you seem to hear each locust discrete from all the rest, and there is a long, slow, pulse in their noise, like the scarcely defined arch of a long and high set bridge. They are all around in every tree, so that the noise seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once, from the whole shell heaven, shivering in your flesh and teasing your eardrums, the boldest of all the sounds of night.

Wonderful. That completely describes a summer concert of cicadas. James Agee could write.

Heat

We would all be dead without the heat of the Sun, of course. Life exists because the great solar furnace showers solar rain upon us. In moderation, of course, filtered by the magnetic shields of Earth, and the thick atmosphere.

Like the face of  God, the Sun is not for our unprotected eyes or flesh. After several mild summers, last summer was prelude to the unrelenting heat of these past three months. This week has been relatively moderate in comparison, highs in the low 90s rather than high 90s and 100 plus. A year ago this past July, I posted a complacent reminiscence about the heat and howling cicadas of my youth, sleeping on a porch at my grandfather’s house in the country. I am mightily tired of both heat and cicadas this early September. Our high today was listed as 91° f. which was plenty hot for me. Bring on October. And hope that unseasonable heat does not pollute the colors and brisk air of that favorite month of mine.

I dismiss all arguments about Global Warming in this current furnace heat. Who knows? The trend for the past one hundred plus years is for generally higher temperatures year round, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. However the long term plays out, I am ready for cool temperatures. Please.

Random Synapse Firings

Walking in the heat induces light-headedness, after a while you feel like you are buoyed up by a steam-heated cloud.

I have walked around town and the river walk three separate times today, later and hotter each time.

One afternoon last week, I went out on my little porch looking down the tree-covered slope behind my apartment building. Something was different. Not the heat, although that was continuing to grow more ferocious. Then I realized there was no sound of cicadas shrilling in the baking air. Too damn hot even for cicadas. They came back by dark. I sat in the dark sipping my gin and tonic, listening to a sound that always calls back my childhood to me, cicadas in the dark. Phil Spector only thought he came up with the “Wall of Sound.” Summer in the south with cicadas, and earlier, tree frogs, out-spectors Phil.

In the evening I even like the heat, a little, in the dark with the cicadas. Up from the drowned years of the early fifties come memories of the sleeping porches in my grandfather’s “big house” on the farm. A large, unshaded house with a tin roof and no insulation soaked up heat all day, so only on the porches was there hope of rest at night.

I would lay there on a metal-framed bed with thin springs and mattress, hearing my sisters giggle together further down the porch, while through the open doors of the house, from the porches out front, came faint sounds of adult talk, punctuated by the rattle of ice cubes in their glasses. I don’t think they drank gin and tonics then. I remember tom collinses being the summertime choice.

Sun is low in the west, now, time to build myself a gin and tonic, listen to the renascent cicadas as the evening breeze comes up. The glow of memory, the bite of gin, and around it all, the cicadas and the heat. Those were good days on the sleeping porch, listening to the sounds of my family, and of a country night in summer.

Life is not so bad when I think of such things.