In the weak sunlight, only leaves at just the right angle glisten, dully, like the eyes of dead fish. A cicada calls twice and falls silent.
cicadas
Another quiet morning as the songbirds go through their annual molt. Cicada. Yellow-billed cuckoo. Last night’s rain glistens on the grass.
Hot and humid. A lone 17-year cicada’s uncanny call. Where last night a drunk intruder stumbled in the weeds, a cloud of gnats, hovering.
Even on such a cold morning, a faint hush of crickets. A cicada starts up: less a whine than a loud whisper. The slow chant of a vireo.
First cicada of the day, easing in and trailing off as if mimicking the Doppler effect. A cuckoo’s faint call—never as far as it sounds.
Already too warm by 7:30; the first cicada by 8:00. Before the 19th century, I wonder, how did people interpret its industrial whine?
With the power out, my house seems unnaturally quiet compared to the warble and hum of a humid summer morning. A cicada’s buzzer goes off.
The first bindweed flower has opened low to the ground, its white ear-trumpet pointed toward the rising sun. The whine of a cicada.
Out around 9:00, in time to hear the dog-day cicadas start up. If it weren’t for cicadas, how would we know what the sun sounds like?
Clear sky, 55°F. A cicada and a wood pewee singing at the same time: Sunlight! Shadows! Up in the other house, the phones begin to ring.
Overcast and humid. It seems unusually quiet, and after ten minutes I realize why: no cicadas! See you in 2025, oh weird ones. Insha’Allah.
A shower blows in. Like late at night when the fridge cycles off, it takes me a second to place the sudden silence: the cicadas stopped.
Clear, 54°F. Squirrels leap through the dripping branches, chase each other up and down trunks. A distant traffic noise of cicadas.
The weird weAHHHHHHHHHHHoh calls of 17-year cicadas join the morning chorus for the first time. A male scarlet tanager flashes past my feet.