Summer

JULY 20, 2007

Crickets.

For some reason, this is the first I’ve heard them in a very long time.

An age ago when I was a child, susceptible to magic, and visiting my grandmother in what had to be for me a portal-place, so unchanging over the decades, unaltered since long before I’d ever seen it—visiting there, I heard the locusts, or cicadas, as Missouri folk call them.

They painted sticky stripes painted around the old trees that lined the street, just to keep the cicadas from getting up into the leaves. I don’t know why. I don’t believe I ever even saw a cicada. I only know that they sang, and when they did, it evidently had to be from the ground.

It was summer then, and the weather in Kansas City, prone to thunderstorm and tornado, often mixed darkness and rain. And as I slept in my Aunt’s old bedroom in the wide white bed, I listened to the shower sound of tires on the wet streets, and cowered from flashing lightening and vaulted thunder.

On dry nights, I listened to the cicadas. And that was summer.

Later, when I was older, summer was running wild after dark, games that covered several yards, and best, the fireflies that turned night into Easter, and shadows into canvas. I remember, after the burning day—the popsicles and the sprinklers—currents of cool air through the hot evening dark—currents pierced by running children, pulled along behind like the ends of broken ribbons.

The grown-ups chose to sit in lawn chairs, or out on the screened in porch, their voices a quiet drone against which fireflies and locust songs seemed loud. While we played our games – kids of all ages, running together, a tame sort of wild through the dark—and careful (avoid notice, and you avoid bed). Pity the child whose civilized bedtime has her in her pajamas, brushed and tucked in, staring at broad daylight on the other side of the curtains.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had any summer. Once in a while, in May when the lily-of-the-valley blooms delicate and secret and yearning in the shadowed places under the trees and the sweet William blows and glows in those same shadows like white smiles in the almost dark of the porch, I catch a tiny heart glimpse of the way it used to be. The hope. The mystery.

I hardly remember that feeling of being set totally free, of being a wild horse in the dark, or of hunting tiny slivers of light across the grass. I almost do. But I don’t feel any of it anymore. Only occasionally that slow, sittin’ on the porch way of passing an evening. And it worries me that a summer is spinning itself out, offering its heady magic, it’s balmy evenings, its beckoning dark—wasted, wasted in a world that prefers plasma screens to fireflies.

But I will tell you this: two houses across the street from me, ripe for summer, full of children, set my heart somewhat at rest. The other night, there they were: two large families, sitting out on the street between two driveways, folding chairs out on the asphalt, parents like human safety cones, as the children swirled around them, the place over-run with bikes and boards and dancing and games. They were out there from eight o’clock, well into the dark, the parents talking in low, heavy summer voices, the children, at home in either yard, about their own wild, magic business.

“Summer,” I laughed out the window as I passed them on the way to the pasture.

“Summer,” gamin Emma sang back to me, “summer, summer, summer.” Eyes half closed, hands stretched high above her head as she twirled, bliss in her delicate renaissance face, her hair, wave upon wave of it, weaving away into the night.

I don’t know why I don’t go out there and sit with them. Because I don’t. Instead, I come out of the house on some pretext and walk across the yard, just to see them for a second, just to know that they are there.

I have horses to feed. Things to write. Books to read. Too tired to make talk, maybe. Or to sit in folding chairs. (So, I find myself saying, you could lie on the lawn with the dogs—). I know I’d be welcome.

Watching them is almost enough. Enough to know the summer is being breathed in and chased. Enough to know there are still children and running in the dark, and leaping and dancing, faces glowing like fox-fire.

It’s sad that all I seem to be able to do is see it all through a rear-view mirror. But there is quiet in this.

I am nearly asleep. They have all gone in now, over there across the street. Children in bed. Parents, too, by now. I am waiting up for Charlotte, who has been fortune telling at Barnes and Noble, dressed in Slytherin robes. Midnight and hot. She will be home soon, maybe before I fall asleep over this keyboard.

I am waiting. Just me and the crickets. And I find that, for now, it’s pretty much enough.