When I was a little girl, I discovered that when I woke up in the morning and heard the cidadas’ song crescendoing outside my window it was going to be a very hot day. Each tree held it’s own choir, and one stand would rise in song, then die away, and then a neighboring group would lift their voices, then decrecendo so the next could begin. The invisible insects’ appearance and name were a mystery, so I thought of them as “heat bugs”.
In my twenties, a friend gave me two volumes of Amish Country Cookbook — full of inexpensive recipes, Pensylvania Dutch humor and a smattering of folk wisdom. I spent hours reading them, trying to understand the science of recipes.
As I was learning how to cook, in one of those volumes I discovered a tidbit that promised, “Thirteen weeks after the katydids start hollering, the first killing frost will come.”
As a gardener, when I notice the cicadas are singing, I note on my calendar the date when I will have to have everything out of the garden, and it has been remarkably accurate. Today is August 26. School started a week ago and the rainy season has begun. I woke up this morning to the sound of the rain and realized I haven’t heard the cicada song this year at all.
We had an extraordinarily wet spring, so much so, that many of the local farmers were not able to put their crops in. (If the farmers don’t get their crops in by June 15th, then they can’t get crop insurance, and this year the fields were too wet for planting.) Some have stands of corn and some have carpets of soybeans, but we also drive past the grim sight of field after field lying fallow.
The wet spring was followed by the hottest July on record. https://www.noaa.gov/…/july-2019-was-hottest-month-on-recor…) This month has been blessedly, *naturally* hot; humid but not bad, and cooler than we’ve learned to expect, perhaps because the fields of corn have not been growing. (The modern corn varieties are planted closer together. Each plant respirates a tremendous amount of water, giving off an astonishing volume of humidity, leaving local dwellers longing for AC to remove water from the air.) I understand that everything affects everything else. Where are the cicadas? Has anyone else noticed the quiet? I wonder, in the style of Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Shall the child of future years hear what Katy did?”
Maximum Grace 