The heat Saturday began subsiding as I walked between the oak tres in the park. I listened, as I always keenly do, to the cicadas humming and buzzing in the branches, the most distinct and loved sound of summer for me.
The slight heat felt warming and comforting. The cicadas and birds sang their songs. The summer flowers glowed with radiant colors, and the trees were reflected in the small lakes like impressionist paintings.
Excerpted from two of my online journal entries from years ago.
Summers when you are old are a far cry from the mellow, golden sunshine-filled days of eternal youth. Looking back, it was apt to call them “endless summers.” Everything about that season in childhood and adolescence sang songs of innocence and the freedom to be young in the best sense of the word.
Now, climate change has made summers much hotter and more humid. Dangerously hot. I get in my furnace of a car for simple errands, and the AC takes forever to cool the interior when it’s been 120 degrees in there for hours.
Nowadays there are no more cooling afternoon thunderstorms on a regular basis. Now it’s heat and drought. In the South especially, summer has become a season to dread, and not just because it’s hurricane season, making us annual sitting-ducks along the coast of the rapidly warming Atlantic Ocean. Let me repeat that: a season to dread.
I don’t feel thirsty like I used to so I probably don’t drink enough. It’s much easier to get dehydrated now. Various meds probably make me feel hotter more quickly in summer. There’s heat exhaustion and heatstroke to be super vigilant about.
When I was young, summer was freedom from school and carefree days of vacation at the beach. The hot weather in those long-ago times was normal and expected. There were always shady streets and air-conditioned homes and cars, like now, but back then these Southern necessities were taken for granted. Nice indeed, but in a power outage you could manage for awhile without them. These days, being in a hot house with only battery-powered fans for even a day or more in a power outage can be life threatening for the elderly.
It’s a different world now, and summer is a time when I stay indoors mostly and count off the days till the first cool snap of Autumn when outdoor life will be bearable again.
I take my walks around sunset or shortly after. In the middle of July the park where I retreat to with its tall, ancient oaks and lush canopy of green offers some relief, as does walking along our famous Battery beside the wide Ashley River just before it joins the Atlantic at Charleston Harbor. There’s usually a nice sea breeze coming from the nearby ocean.
All of this out of the way, and despite my changed relationship with summer over the course of a lifetime, there is one constant that has always, and still does, bring me much joy and pleasure: the unvarying return of the song of cicadas in seemingly all our trees.
Every summer that I can remember I’ve listened to them, mostly as background insect noise, but in later years as sweetly memory-drenched sounds of a time when summer was not a fearsome season to fear and dread but to enjoy and savor.
My first lasting memory of summer cicada symphonies was when I was a 19-year-old college sophomore at the University of New Orleans at the beginning of the fall semester in early September 1971. I remember distinctly walking to the library in the middle of campus and hearing a veritable wall of sound from the cicadas, rhythmic, loud, and pulsating with the intensity of life throughout my walk to and from the library, past numerous small live oak trees.
I was a bundle of nerves in my early college years. Something about that primordial insect sound soothed me and stirred subconscious memories of countless summers in youth when this unforgettable sound was always in the background of our endless romping, running and playing outdoors just after supper, before the sun set and night had enveloped our magical childhood world of outdoor fun and imagination. All this decades before the Internet would have kept us indoors, glued to our screens and computer devices of varying sorts.
The sound of cicadas has been for me one of those rare natural sounds that seems to dissolve time. I do not merely hear cicadas; I remember countless summers through them, even it the details are now hazy. But the overall sensation and effect of those sounds remain deep with my soul. They are a part of me.
Here are some of the memories cicadas in summer evoke: childhood evenings that seemed endless; bare feet on warm grass; screen doors slamming behind us as we ran out to play after supper; fireflies beginning to appear; porch swings creaking; reading on a shaded porch; and that first awareness that another summer would eventually end.
Summer was not eternal after all. School would be starting again soon. However, the sound of cicadas would linger through September, reminding us all of the fleeting joys of the season we would soon miss.
Some final thoughts about the sounds cicadas make.
The sound is remarkably constant.
It accompanies transitions as it ebbs and flows. The chorus often swells as fierce afternoon heat begins to soften and the light turns golden. It is a sound vibrating with life, yet fleeting as night approaches. Most adult cicadas live only a few weeks. Their seemingly fierce song is thus the sound of a brief life lived to its fullest.
Lastly, there is the acoustic quality itself.
As one naturalist has observed, “The overlapping pulses produce a kind of natural drone—not monotonous, but richly textured. Psychologically, such sounds encourage contemplation because they fill the silence without demanding attention. They create space for thought rather than interrupt it.”
I think that describes well what this sound does for me. It induces a sense of timelessness about Nature, and the realization that we need our lives to be often inspired by the mystery, beauty and complexity of the natural world.
For me, cicadas symbolize the fulfillment of summer’s plan to bring about the full fruition of life in one brief season.
Perhaps that is why, as I grow older, their chorus acquires increasing emotional depth. I hear in their pulsating, powerfully alive song, all of my summers past.
As the poet Matsuo Badho wrote:
Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests
they are about to die.
The other evening at sunset diluting a walk along the tidal creek outside my apartment, I recorded this video:
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