Crickets
Thoughts in anticipation of autumn
Several nights ago the first crickets of the season made their presence known, singing in the soft orange light of dusk, and my heart leapt with joy. They appear suddenly around the beginning of August every year. Of all the magnificent sounds in nature, the comforting hum of crickets is by far my favorite. There is something deeply settling about going out into the yard and hearing them for the first time as the daylight disappears on the western horizon. It feels like returning to my own body after too long in my head, like a large exhale after a long day. They are a herald of the slow change of seasons, a reminder that summer doesn’t last forever and the promise of fall, and cooler weather, is on its way.
Having spent the first eighteen years of my life in Texas, there is a sense burrowed right down in my bones that looks forward to fall with ecstatic longing. By the time August rolled around in my childhood, the ground was hard and parched from weeks without rain and temperatures above 100. I would peruse my mom’s LL Bean and Land’s End catalogs and look with envy on the photos of teens going back to school in jeans, flannel shirts and comfy sweaters, while I was laying on the floor next to the air conditioning vent, hair plastered to the back of my sweaty neck as I sucked down glass after glass of iced tea. The first moderately cool day in Texas was a cause of celebration (usually not until late September), a sign that we had survived another blazing hot summer. Because of this, fall was by far my favorite season, a break from the heat and a time when we spent many weekends camping at nearby state parks.
My love of fall deepened immensely when I moved to Western North Carolina for college, a region famous for its gorgeous foliage. My first semester there I pressed vibrant orange and red leaves into all of my textbooks, hoarding the fantastic colors that were richer than any I’d ever seen before. My passion for the season has only grown stronger in the almost ten years I’ve lived in Ohio. Here summers are mild (at least by Texas standards) and winters are much colder, but there remains something uniquely beautiful about autumn that has captured my heart.
And crickets are the most abiding sound of fall. In these early days of August, they only hum at night, replaced by the drone of cicadas during the day, which I have always equated with the sound of summer heat. As the days grow cooler, the cicadas grow quiet and the crickets hum day and night, their peaceful chorus becoming a near-constant soundtrack to the colors that slowly begin to change. First the autumn wildflowers—deep purple ironweed, bright goldenrod, and a rare shock of red cardinal flower along stream banks. Then, slowly, the trees—walnut and sycamore are the first to turn, followed by the extravagant red and orange of the maples, and finally the quiet dusky browns of the oaks just as the nights turn frosty.
My point in this extended love song to crickets is that life is beautiful. It’s easy to lose sight of such penetrating beauty when our hearts are breaking for immigrant neighbors being detained and when we witness the more ordinary cruelty of racism and the poverty that extractive capitalism breeds. But the crickets remind me to be still, and listen, and pay attention to another season beginning to unfold in all its beauty. I have been writing some hard words about chronic illness and self-compassion, making friends with my body in the midst of pain, but the crickets are calling, reminding me to be present in this moment and listen to the voice of the earth singing through their tiny bodies.