Back in Time (Part 6) 1981

Summer will soon be a memory.   The past two mornings were quite cool for this time of year, and it was delightful.  To sit on the porch in the rocking chair and not be blanketed with heat and humidity is truly something to savor after a long and hot summer in Charleston.  I can always tell when the season is waning by the fading out of the cicadas in the pecan tree in back of our garden.  This ritualistic summer sound has mesmerized me for decades, and is THE sound that, more than anything else, takes me back to summers past.   All I have to do is close my eyes and I am transported by that rising, humming insect music to those days of my youth, which, if not more carefree, at least presented the prospect of an endless series of future summers and time without end.   That’s what you feel when you are young. 

I have always been drawn to these aspects of summer — the cicadas in the trees, the huge cumulus clouds floating high overhead, the lazy, languid pace of life induced by the heat and humidity of our Southern summers.

To document exactly what I am referring to, and to show how little some things change over the years, I am including here an excerpt from my journal of June 20, 1981, slightly more than 30 years ago.   It was summer vacation after my first full year of teaching.   What an unforgettable time that was!   I used those summers off to take graduate courses in education, and to reflect on all that had been packed into the previous months.

             "For the first time in nine months, I have been able to completely relax and devote myself to cultivating true solitude and inner peace,   not the destructive depression of loneliness, but aloneness, something altogether different.  Yesterday afternoon the summer heat subsided to clouds and gusty winds, the trees becoming quite animated and alive and a wonderful coolness coming over everything as I sat on my balcony overlooking the woods.  It was so refreshing to sit out there, lingering in anticipation of an ever more cooling rain, something that has become a precious commodity these last few drought-filled years.  When the winds and skies seem more normal, life itself seems more stable and at tenuous peaces with its surroundings.  Now also, the cicadas are making their annual summer songs in the trees, hesitantly at first.   More than any sound in Nature, I suppose, it is this one which for me has the richest associations and memories of summers past.  The cicada sound epitomizes the sultry rhythms of summer and those late July and August afternoons in which their song eases darkness over the slowly cooling land.  Summer is always the most carefree season of the year, oppressively hot as it is, and calls us back to your youth, in a rather harmless way, I think."

          Three weeks later, I recorded this on July 8:  "…It was so peaceful last night.  The cicadas hummed in the trees until sundown; then the regular night sounds took up the chorus.  I got up early this morning, and, going out on the balcony, immediately saw two rabbits scampering among the grass looking for tender shoots to eat.  Amazing when you consider this little sanctuary is situated in the midst of a large, urban area."

          The eternal rhythms and moods of summer.  I am a creature of the changing seasons.    This has been consistent over time with me.