June is
almost over and summer is in full swing.
We’ve had Father’s Day and my older daughter’s birthday and now we’re
bearing down on the July 4th weekend which will likely be noisy with
folks lighting off fireworks in the street and in their yards. Lawn mowers, blowers, power washers and the
sounds of road equipment mingle with the voices of children splashing in
backyard pools and riding bikes in the heat of the day. With the daily birdsong, chittering of
squirrels and humming of insects flying busily from flower to flower and person
to person, these are the elements of the song of summer. Even the nights are full of sounds with
peepers and tree toads, the soft swish of traffic on the highway, crunch of
gravel under tires on the side street, and voices floating from patios and open
windows as people relax after the heat of the day.
When I
was a kid summer meant days spent mostly outside from morning until
bedtime. Swinging, riding bikes, walking
to a friend’s house or to the store with my mother, running through the
sprinkler, or reading books for hours laying on a blanket in the shade are all
things that filled the hot sunny days.
After dinner was for playing tag or hide and seek with my brothers and
cousins, and sipping lemonade on the porch with my family as bugs swarmed
around the yellow bulb in the porch light.
I remember one time when a huge bug landed right in the middle of my
brother Dan’s belly and my mother said it was June bug, which is a type of very
large beetle. It was brown with shiny
hard looking wings and was as large as my father’s thumbnail. My brother screamed (as did I) and quickly
brushed it off his yellow t-shirt. We used
to catch lightning bugs and put them in mayonnaise jars we had punched holes in
the lid with nails and filled with some blades of grass and watch them light up
the darkness like tiny lanterns later in our rooms. Of course, if you made the air holes in the lid
too big the bugs ended up on your ceiling or window screen because they just
crawled out. I don’t imagine my mother
liked it very much when that happened, but I don’t remember her ever mentioning
it. I guess it just came with the
territory of raising 4 kids, 3 of whom were boys and teaching them about
nature. Summer nights were filled with
the sounds of my father watching TV, the whirring of the window fan, and the
peepers’ high pitched singing broken up occasionally by the fire siren and
howling dogs. Our neighbor 2 doors down
kept 3 or 4 hunting dogs and boy did they howl when the fire siren went
off. It was an eerie sound in the middle
of the night that always gave me a hollow feeling inside. It seems the summer is never quiet.
As we
move into July and then into August the sounds of summer change, acorns begin
to fall from our oak tree onto the driveway and roof in July, crickets begin to
sing and locusts and grasshoppers make themselves heard with their nonstop
noise that sounds like thousands of tiny wooden beads being shaken together. I marvel at the songs that nature sings, especially
in summer.
