Ballad for Summer’s End

Well, it happened again. I heard a song on the Starbucks playlist whose artist I didn’t know. This time, I was fast enough to ask the barista while the song was still playing, but the app wouldn’t open. Another pleasant baritone, another catchy melody, but the names of both elude me, and all due to a computer slowdown. I’m not sure if it’s the same slowdown we’ve been having at work, but it’s really no matter—the point is, if I don’t like a song, it will probably play ad nauseam. If I do like it, and ask someone about it, I’m just a little too late to find out what it is, and they won’t play it again for another three months at least.

You’re probably thinking, “Wordplay, can’t you find anything else to write about?” And the answer is, “Not really.” There’s a real end of the summer feeling here: it’s hot, but very still; students have started to appear here and there, but at the same time, there’s a feeling of absence, as if quite a few people are out of town on vacation. It’s neither here nor there, just that typical August feeling of vacancy. If you’re in a university town and are neither a student nor a professor, you sense the pause in the academic calendar, but since it doesn’t affect you, you have neither anxiety about getting everything done in time nor the anticipation of a brand-new academic year. It’s just a hot, drowsy lull. It still looks like summer, there’s no hint of fall yet (some years the nights have started to cool a bit by now, but not this year), and if you work in retail, you’re probably unpacking things for a Labor Day sale. You’re still thinking ice cream; apple cider hasn’t yet entered your thoughts; and winter is still as a distant dream.

This is not going to be the lyrical “changing of the seasons” post I did a couple of times in the past. Not really feeling that elegiac Wordsworth melancholy right now; it’s more of a heat-induced stupefaction. If I could encapsulate what I am feeling, it would be more along the lines of, “If only I had my own front porch, and my own pitcher of iced tea, so I could sit and sip and listen to the crickets in peace and look up at the stars once in a while.” I’ve never had that in my entire adult life, which seems like a shame, but the next place I live will have at least a balcony, if not a porch, if there’s any justice in the world. I lived in Lexington for many years with barely a glimpse of fireflies and certainly no place to sit outside and enjoy the long summer evenings that are one of the best things about Kentucky, but maybe that will change some time.

With nothing else going on, this seems like a good time to entertain idle questions, in lieu of falling asleep in the heat and ending up down some rabbit hole. So here’s one: if you were in the same predicament as the people in the movie Groundhog Day but actually got to pick the day that keeps repeating, what day would it be? For me, it would probably be a day in early summer, a day of bright blue skies and puffy clouds. I don’t think it would be August—although if I ever get that porch swing and glass of iced tea, I might change my mind about that. Spring is gorgeous here, but it’s not quite summer. Fall is also quite nice much of the time, but it means summer is over with for another year. And although winter has its own beauty, it’s possibly enjoyed best of all in small doses—at least, that’s my opinion.

So this is my end-of-summer post, and we’ll dispense with all the Persephone and Demeter references and Keatsian ode-to-autumn rhapsodies this time around because I’m afraid I was starting to repeat myself a little bit. I will report to you with a hint of disapproval that since I work in retail, I’ve already spotted the presence of “seasonal merchandise” and am dreading the moment, which will probably be next week, when I walk to the front of the store and see Halloween yard decor and animatronic ghouls. Not because I’m scared of those goobers, but because it interferes with my seasonal clock. Werewolves in August? Sheesh, whose idea was that?

Magnetic Poetry

While packing this week, I started looking at things I hadn't looked at in a while, the way you do when you're shifting items from one place to another. Since my head is too full of moving details to leave much room for topical inspiration, I thought I'd share something I found in my Magnetic Poetry Kit Book of Poetry, discovered as I was clearing a shelf the other day. A magnetic poetry kit may seem like a kitschy item, but its use fits in with my approach to poetry. More about that later, but right now here is the poem I wrote with it, at the kitchen table in my last apartment, if I'm not mistaken--which makes the poem nearly 20 years old.

(Untitled)

the avenue to love
has summer in it
minute tendrils
grow from cracks
at evening
leaves blossom by morning
an immense and secret bouquet
a staggering work
of liquid song wind
wanting

and dirt

I don't think it's bad for a poem written, most likely, after dinner, one of the first I composed with the poetry kit. I'm not sure I could have written it if not for the kit, and I'll tell you why. It's my compression theory of poetry: the more constraints you put on writing, whether it's time, number of syllables, availability of words, or something else, the more an inner censor is silenced, letting you compose without restraint. I guess you could also call it the Poetry Paradox, and it applies to all writing, as far as I've been able to discover. You narrow your choices and make do with limitations, and the energy you don't spend ransacking the entire English language opens a third poetic eye. It's like all those frugal housewives making do with rations during World War II and somehow coming up with genius recipes. Some of the best dishes are composed of simple ingredients. It's the same with words.

I was writing about author's intent a few weeks ago, and although I can't remember exactly when I wrote this poem--I'm guessing sometime between Fall 1998 and Summer 1999--I seem to recall being in the grip of some passion, requited or unrequited, at the time. It's not a bitter poem, but rather a sort of celebratory one, and that's saying something considering how frustrated I remember feeling then. I liked it well enough that I left it on the magnetic poetry board, and when I opened it up, it was just as it was when I wrote it. It's been on my shelf ever since I moved in here. I remember that I was experimenting with growing kitchen herbs in windowsill containers around the time I wrote the poem, which may account for the botanical imagery.

It's a very summery poem and seems appropriate for ushering in the month of June. I like the idea of a secret garden taking hold imperceptibly and growing into something vast and wonderful, without permission and without fanfare. It's a little like Coleridge's secret ministry of frost, except that it celebrates a different season.

May all the avenues you travel this summer blossom with minute trendrils and fragrant bouquets in your wake and may they make a soft place for your footsteps to land. I'm hoping the same for myself.

Through a Glass, Darkly

I happened to read the other day that the public schools here were starting fall classes this week, and in fact, they began on Wednesday. It seems to me that the date of school opening has inched much closer to the beginning of August than it was when I was a student. It's not that I have any stake in it, but it goes against my grain to think of going back to school while summer is still in full flower. It seems a little cruel and unusual, but don't tell any school administrators I said so. It's just my personal opinion, which means little.

I tend to think that school should start, at the earliest, at the very end of August, or better yet, right after Labor Day. The Christmas holiday should be two weeks long, and there should be a full week of spring break or Easter recess, whichever you prefer to call it. Summer vacation should be three months long, and it should begin either right before Memorial Day or immediately after. Of course, my first elementary school experience was in Florida, where snow days never wreaked havoc with the school calendar, and a schedule like this was actually possible.

As much as I liked summer vacations as a child, I was usually a bit excited about going back to school in those early years. There would be new clothes, a new lunch box, and that wonderful smell of new composition books, pencils, and ink cartridges. When I was in school, I didn't mind it most of the time and sometimes quite enjoyed being there. It's just that vacations and the freedom that came with them were so much more fun, and sitting in a classroom all day is difficult even for a good student. In many ways, it was a more innocent time, though I know it's a truism to say so.

I reminded myself when out and about this week to be on the lookout for school buses and have, indeed, seen several. Yes, everything seems a bit muddled when school buses appear only a week and a half into August, but as muddled as the state of the world is generally, an anomaly like this is only a drop in the bucket. I pulled into the parking lot of a local Catholic Church the other day, purely on impulse, because I wondered if it might be open (it has wonderful light, which is great for meditation). In the parking lot was an expensive-looking SUV with dark tinted windows and the engine running, a slightly ominous sight that I'm pretty sure would have given me pause even as a child.

I went to Catholic schools where the church was next door to the school building and seemed a fairly benign place, even if you didn't exactly believe everything they told you. Church was a place where they had bingo and spaghetti dinners, not weird-looking SUVs that kept their windows rolled up and engines running for fifteen minutes at a time. I considered whether this was any of my business or not, as all kinds of strange things seem to happen these days without anyone taking notice, but in the end I decided to report it to the church. The woman I talked to seemed to take it in stride, though she did say they had noticed an uptick in the number of people pulling into their lot to check their cell phones.

OK, well, I'm old-fashioned, I believe in no school till Labor Day, watching out for school buses, and reporting suspicious activity--so I did my part. I hope someone would think it a little stranger if this happened in a school parking lot with kids around, but it does seem to take a lot to get people's attention these days, so I don't really know. I guess the truth is that I just don't like tinted windows.

Galleons of Night

The best word for the weather we've been having is probably "unsettled." There's nothing strange about summer thunderstorms in Kentucky, but it has been unusually scorching for June. Over the last few days, huge clouds have blown in that looked like they might have sailed all the way up from the Gulf, and there have been rumbles of thunder and showers off and on. The brief afternoon storm we had on Tuesday didn't do much to break the heat; when I walked that evening, it was like pushing through gauze just to stroll down the sidewalk.

I heard yesterday that some of the storms in the Midwest were turning out to be severe, but it looked like most of that weather was passing to our north. Nevertheless, the sky grew very dark late this afternoon, and I unplugged several appliances while waiting to see if things would blow over. The heat index was supposed to be near 110 today, and I was hoping a good storm would push some of the hot air out. That did in fact happen, though the extreme change in temperature was rather jarring. When I went outside a while ago, the wind was very cool, though the hallway of this building was still humid. We had not one but two tornado watches, issued by two different bureaus, including one in Oklahoma (and they should know).

A few weeks ago, I was nearly caught in a storm when some black clouds that I thought were moving in a different direction turned out to be heading the same way I was. How nice! I hadn't gone very far when a decisive lightning flash put an end to my walk, and I had to scramble up a bank and onto the porch of a nearby office building to avoid a drenching. The worst part was brief, but I ended up having to head home anyway because the light but steady rain that followed showed no signs of letting up, and there were a few dark clouds still on the horizon.

Even though things looked clear when I went out earlier tonight, the wind was gusting, and I decided against the risk of getting caught out in another storm. It seemed more like the interlude between two tempestuous scenes of an opera involving Valkyrie and various agitated gods than a true clearing. Also, I had seen the word "derecho" in yesterday's forecast, a term that apparently denotes very strong winds. While I'm not sure I've ever been in one, it's one of those terms like "wind shear" or "scirocco" that doesn't bode well for a calm walk in nature. It seems a good idea to avoid going out in conditions with exotic-sounding names the mechanics of which you're unsure of.

I'm still hearing rumbles of thunder, though our tornado watches have expired. Although I like summer thunderstorms, the restless conditions over the last couple of days have seemed--except for the heat--more like autumn than June. I saw some high-flying clouds streaming over the moon the other night that were straight out of some adventure story involving Gothic suspense and derring-do, something by Daphne du Maurier, perhaps. Instead of the usual suburban scene, you half-expected to see a cloaked rider heading down the street at a gallop, with a ship moored at a dock at the end of the road and mysterious cargo being boarded. However, it was merely the same old street on a cloudy summer night.

Manhattanhenge

I read an article just before Memorial Day weekend about Manhattanhenge, the twice-yearly phenomenon in which the setting sun lines up with the east-west streets of the city and turns the thoroughfares into canyons of light. It's a charming notion, to me at least, to think of those busy New Yorkers stopping in the streets to turn their faces west, transformed for a minute or two into quasi-sun worshippers amid traffic, skyscrapers, and all the trappings of urban life. This year, the spring event coincided with Memorial Day, lending real star power to the day most Americans consider to be the true start of summer.

It's kind of a slow week here, but I've had the image of Manhattanhenge in mind ever since I read the article and saw the very striking photo accompanying it. You may be thinking, jeez, what is it with you, Wordplay, if you're not talking about the moon, you're talking about the sun. Are you some kind of astronomer or something? The answer is no, I'm not, but at least the sky is still one place you can look that's free of advertising and marketing efforts, except for an occasional Goodyear blimp or low-flying plane--and you've got to expect a few things like that.

At any rate, I was taking a walk a few evenings ago that was blessed by a relative absence of people on the streets, as pleasant a June evening (weatherwise) as you could wish. I had made my way through the neighborhood and turned toward home on an east-west street when I noticed how gorgeous the sun looked going down, fiery round and orange-red over some trees and the edge of a building. It had set a bank of clouds glowing in shades of lavender and seemed to me almost as good as Manhattanhenge. I glanced at a leafy lane to my left on which an early streetlight was burning, its glow muted by the daylight that still hung in the air. It looked homely and inviting, even though I'm not particularly fond of that street.

A few steps more, and a slight breeze caught the corner of my camp shirt. I looked at the almost tropical-seeming sunset and felt, for a few seconds, a rush of summertime ease. With a little imagination, I could almost believe that the street I had just passed was the last row of houses before the dunes and that I was now walking on the beach, a sea breeze in my hair and a relaxation in my step that wasn't there before. Even my clothes felt looser. The illusion was probably helped by the fact that I'd been seeing some unfamiliar birds--attracted, no doubt, by the newly engineered watercourse in the neighborhood--that resemble sandpipers in both their movements and their calls. Seeing them run across the pavement with their quick steps, calling to one another with shrill cries, has the capacity to turn even a land-locked parking lot into a shining expanse of sand.

I breathed in and enjoyed my mini-vacation, which was over with very quickly. As I turned away from the sun and passed the stadium, some loud popping noises that started up out of nowhere resolved into fireworks being set off at the back of the lot, attracting a bit of a crowd in the process. There was nothing else going on that I could see, so perhaps someone from the city was practicing for the Fourth of July. The display was modestly impressive, but the noise broke up the last of my beach reverie, and I was unmistakably back in the neighborhood with a number of people milling around.

That little dab of beachiness will no doubt last me for quite some time. I've tried, on my last couple of walks, to recreate the experience, but due to the timing being off and one thing or another, it hasn't happened again, and I doubt if it can be repeated in the same way. However, the night it happened was also the night I saw the first fireflies of the season twinkling above the grass on my street, a sign in Kentucky that summer has unquestionably arrived, no matter how far away the beach may be. Greetings, Manhattanhenge. Greetings, fireflies. Finally, we have summer.

Nothing to See Here, Except . . .

Things have been quiet around here for the last week or so. Traffic is light, Starbucks has been mostly empty, and there's a feeling that everybody must be out of town on vacation. It's very pleasant. Even the fireflies seem to be off napping somewhere.

Coinciding with that, we've had sort of a summer version of a polar vortex, with a storm front moving in and cooling things down, trailing ragged thunderclouds and pinkish-gold sunsets in its wake. It's amazing how charming a cold spell can be when it happens in the middle of July, dropping temperatures to the 70s, lowering humidity, and still allowing the sun to shine.

A little over a week ago, it was so humid that even at 8:30 at night, walking was like wading slowly through curtains of moisture. I much prefer that to walking through sleet and snow, but it does sap your energy if it goes on long enough. After a week of storm clouds wildly chasing sunshine, and vice versa, we're back to heat and humidity, though I understand we're in for another cooling spell in a day or so.

Among the charms of a summer evening's walk this week, I have spotted: toadstools, like something from a nursery rhyme, right on my street; a cardinal on a treetop silhouetted against the sky; two rabbits sitting together in a field; scampering chipmunks; porches edged with riotous flowers; and a complex sunset of mauve, pink, and orange. Tonight, big, fat cumulus clouds, tinged with apricot from the setting sun, seemed too lazy even to move, as if an artist had painted them on the backdrop of the sky and then went off on tea break, leaving them hanging.

If you looked at the image of July in one of those medieval books of hours, like the Très Riches Heures du Duc Berry, you would see what July looks like around here, minus the sheep and the castle. In fact, there is a street named Kastle near here, and there's a house not far away where (I'm not kidding) a sheep used to graze in the yard, so with a little imagination you can see some overlap. It's a pity the sheep is gone. I never saw it in the summer, but it would have made a lovely Très Rich Hours scene, Kentucky style, to go with all the cardinals, rabbits, hostas, and begonias of our suburban summer.

Portrait of a Summer Night

Walking tonight in the Arboretum, I was thinking about summers past. It was a lovely June evening, and the hilltop views of the big orange sun going down were almost panoramic: I felt I was on top of a mountain and could see for miles. There was a grandeur about the sunset, with dramatic rays of sunlight streaming out from behind gorgeous clouds in a clean blue sky. But I was thinking back to my childhood, when the archetypal summer night was contained within the modest yard of my grandparents' frame house in a small Kentucky town.

I wonder if most people don't have a similar image that conjures up everything a summer night consists of. For me, it goes like this: a backyard of green grass, tilted slightly uphill, big enough for croquet wickets near the top and a gathering of lawn chairs under a big maple at the bottom. Under the tree was where the grownups sat. The kids didn't sit anywhere for long, but there were several options: a picnic table, a swing-set, and a glider on the back porch. If you sat on the glider, you'd share it with my grandfather, who favored it, and who always had his tobacco can and cane nearby.

The house itself smelled like pipe tobacco, the soap my grandmother used in her bathroom, biscuits, and fried chicken. It had a smell all its own, somehow old-fashioned and Southern, and it will never be duplicated. I remember also the damp, musty smell of the basement with its gravel floor and rough-hewn posts, usually visited when Mason jars were needed for fireflies. It was full of Daddy-long-legs, was lit by a bare bulb, and was somewhat of a novelty in my eyes. In Florida, where I lived with my parents and siblings, I hadn't seen many houses with basements.

There was always something to eat at the house, since family gatherings inevitably involved food: my grandmother's fried chicken, salty and tender, especially the little piece with the wishbone that I liked; her rib-sticking biscuits (I later imagined Tolkien's lembas as being a bit like those savory morsels of shortening, flour, and salt); potato salad; corn on the cob, baked beans with onions, ambrosia salad, green beans with ham; cucumbers in vinegar; cornbread (salty, not sweet); sliced cantaloupe; watermelon; and brownies. Sometimes, we'd make ice cream, and the kids would all take turns with the crank. That ice cream was both sweet and salty, due to the rock salt we used.

There were only four rooms in the small square house besides the bathroom. The kitchen, which opened onto the back porch, was the heart of the enterprise, the repository of all the food, and the place where as many as ten people were sometimes crowded around the table if it was raining. (Typically, everybody picked a spot outside, picnic-style, paper plates full and balanced precariously.) There were African violets in the kitchen window, countertops full of food-containing Tupperware, and (always) a plate of biscuits on top of the stove.

There were also two bedrooms and a living room. When we visited our grandparents from Florida, my brother and sister and I would sleep on fold-out cots in the living room. Otherwise, that room was mainly known as the way out to the front porch.

I remember the front porch as being the domain of kids; there was another glider there, the perfect spot for drinking sweet iced tea and rocking slowly. There was a maple tree in the front yard that we liked to climb, and there would sometimes be as many as six or seven cousins perched on various branches. When we weren't doing that, we'd watch people from the neighborhood, either on foot or in cars, go up and down the street. It wasn't a busy street, and there was just enough activity to be interesting. Three doors down was a tiny plaza with a laundromat, where my mother would do our vacation laundry and we'd buy Ale-8-Ones (a local soft drink with a gingery bite) out of the machine.

What did we do on those long summer nights? Nothing special, but that's what was so great about them. To me, the choices seemed infinite: first of all, you would eat. Afterwards, you could sit on the glider, listening to it squeak as you rocked back and forth, climb the tree, play croquet, goof around on the swing-set, make ice cream, listen to the grownups talk, catch fireflies, watch Amos (our Grandpa's big collie) chase his tail, view home movies on a screen in the back yard, play with sparklers (if it was near the Fourth of July), have another biscuit, and look forward to the next day's outing to Natural Bridge or Boonesborough State Park.

I realize now that things were not as perfect as they seemed, but I'm glad I didn't know, because I have those warm, carefree nights, somehow both aimless and full, to go back to in my mind. They're still my yardstick for what a summer night is supposed to be. I remember the feeling of being surrounded by people, of belonging, and of never being bored. I remember the green-yellow light of the fireflies, blinking on and off in the yard, and how they became a living nightlight, small Mason jar beacons to drift off to sleep by in the living room. The next morning we'd let them go, and they'd all disappear in the bright light of day, a bit dazed by their experience, if you ask me. It didn't matter: they'd be back, all out again in force when twilight fell, at the end of another full and infinitely long summer day.

Looking With Persephone

A couple of weeks ago, I was taking an evening walk when I noticed how pleasantly cool it was. This was in the midst of a heat wave, which made exercise in the middle of the day unwise at worst and unpleasant at best. It was one of those evenings that gives you a foretaste of fall. A true summer evening, even as it cools down, retains a lazy residue of the warmth and humidity of the day. Those evenings that signal change have a completely different character, even a slight urgency. Hurry up! Time to get the harvest in and the barns filled! You'll be carving pumpkins before you know it!

At the time, I thought, "How nice this feels." Even as inveterate a fan of summer as I am can't help but be a little refreshed by the cooling and hint of change in the air that generally comes around Labor Day. This year, having been baked to a crunch during an unusually searing summer (on the Fourth of July, it seemed the height of foolishness to step outside the door without a sizable water bottle), even I say the cooling is welcome.

There have been times in the past when I didn't want summer to end, but my feelings are conflicted this year. September and October are usually very pleasant here, and the turning of the leaves can be spectacular. You're always aware, though, of November, that moody month with a split personality, out there waiting in the wings. In the best years, it's a continuation of October's glorious red and gold riot, Keats's "close-bosom friend of the maturing sun"; it may even be an Indian summer extravaganza. In the worst of times (which seems to be most of the time), it ushers in an unending series of dark, damp, and gloomy days that last, off and on, until the latter part of March.

Still, there is a certain buzz about the early and middle days of autumn. I have been reading essays lately about the association of fall with new beginnings. A Jungian writer points out that this is when school begins, older kids go off to college, and adults return to their jobs with (we hope) renewed vigor and enthusiasm for new projects that couldn't get off the ground while people were out on vacation. There is a cozy quality about fall and all of that soup-making, squash-baking, leaf-raking hearth and home activity touted by homemaker magazines and advertising campaigns for cardigans and corduroy. It's beguiling, in a way; you can still be active outside, but the inside of your home is more welcoming than it was in July, and you may actually want to be in your kitchen, making chili, pigs-in-blankets, and apple cake.

I think this emphasis on change and new beginnings is real but ironic. In nature, spring is the time of the new. Spring is when Persephone, forced underground in the autumn to spend the six dark months with Hades, comes joyously back to the earth accompanied by new flowerings, the greening of fields and trees, and the warming sun. For many of us, however, although spring is a very welcome sight, it does, in fact, signal an ending -- of the spring semester at school, of the season of serious work and deadlines, of the calendar of normal activities soon to be interrupted by summer vacations. When I was an undergraduate, I sometimes felt at a loss in the spring, viewing summer as an upheaval that required new plans to be made.

I'm different now, having reverted to my childhood mold. I always say that no matter how hot it is, I'll take a summer day over a winter one any time. Exhilarating winter days of sunshine on clean, sparkling snow are an ideal but rarely seen, but a summer day is always a summer day. Spring and fall are more ambiguous, each signaling change in its own way and each (unless we work on the land) at odds with some of our human purposes. Maybe "April is the cruelest month," if your circumstances are unlucky, as mine have sometimes been. But, all other things being equal, could it ever top the last week of November? Or the first week of January?

Even as I welcome the release from the heat, I find myself looking back over my shoulder with regret, like Persephone, at the bright skies, warm nights of fireflies and crickets, and full-leafed trees of summer now receding. Orion is rising, but Persephone is fading. Three months from now, I'll be dreaming of July. Have I ever dreamed of December?

Summer of Wings

It's been really hot here lately; yesterday it was 95 (according to the bank clock over by the grocery store, it might have been closer to 100). It wasn't quite as hot today -- more like 90 -- and we had a little rain. I wouldn't exactly say that I like my summers quite this hot, but I'll take this over the middle of January any day. At least the sun is shining, and summer is teeming with life.

We had a wet spring, and it's been warm, which is good for all kinds of insects. There had been reports that firefly populations were decreasing in recent years, but there have been loads of them this summer. Going for an evening walk has been magical with all those little lights winking off and on, as if entire constellations had fallen from the sky and landed in the front lawns of the neighborhood. One night, a firefly landed on my pearl ring and hung on for quite a long time. I imagine he was attracted to the glow of the pearl and thought he'd met the Marilyn Monroe of fireflies.

I don't remember noticing a lot of dragonflies in years past, but I've seen many of them this year. One morning on my way to work I was stopped at a light when a group of them appeared out of nowhere, hovering in unison, with a slight rhythmic pulse, in between two lanes of traffic. They were like a mirage, as strange a sight as I have ever seen on Limestone on a summer morning, like fairies had suddenly descended on the street. I would almost have thought I was imagining them except that I glanced in my rear-view mirror and saw the face of the driver behind me. She had seen them, too.

Last week, I was sitting with some friends behind their family's summer house overlooking Craig's Creek and the Ohio River, watching the sun go down. Someone commented on the cicadas, which were really making a racket. I'm so used to it that it was just background noise to me until someone mentioned it. Both of my friends are from the South but live in Northern California. One of them has a degree in entomology, and he talked about how few insects there are in San Francisco compared to here.

Sitting there listening to those cicadas shrieking in the humid air as my friend talked gave me a new appreciation for them; I think I'd miss them if they weren't around, despite their noise, because they just sound like a summer night. It's actually the males making all the hullabaloo; they are singing to the female cicadas, trying to get a date.

While I was out walking this morning, I noticed many butterflies of varying sizes and colors. There are always a lot of butterflies in the summer, and maybe I'm imagining it since I'm so tuned into insects this year, but it seems as if there are more than usual, and more colorful ones. I feel like I'm in a technicolor nature film. Last week, by the Ohio, a large, almost iridescent blue one flew over us, flashing its wings in the sun. It looked like a small bird. I saw one this morning that had big yellow wings edged with elegant black spots, and it was also quite a beauty.

As for myths, dragonflies have had a fearsome reputation in some places, but in Norse mythology they are associated with Freya, the goddess of love and fertility. Butterflies represented psyche for the Greeks; the Blackfeet of North America believed that butterflies were bringers of dreams. For the Mayans, fireflies carried starlight, and cicadas, in ancient Greece, represented ecstasy.

There is a scene near the end of the post-apocalyptic film The Road in which the man and his son see a few flying insects, and it is a sign of hope. It had seemed until then that all life had been stamped out except for a few desperate (and not very attractive) humans. Maybe that's why it feels like a good omen to see all of these creatures around this summer. Despite everything, life persists and even, in some cases, thrives.