I think what I’ll miss most are the sounds.
Every morning, it’s generally the same. The doves start moaning their sad songs somewhere in the shrubbery outside my window. At the same time, there’s the invisible, electric buzz of a cicada (or a tree frog, depending on who you ask) sizzling in a nearby tree. That buzz. You can never figure out exactly where it’s coming from. Is it up high? Down low? To the east or to the west? I’ve got a smartphone with apps that can foretell the weather for weeks to come, but all I really need is the high note of that buzzing insect (or frog) to know that summer hasn’t gone anywhere just yet.
The beauty of the buzzing thing is that it serves as the perfect accompaniment to other noise. If the guy next door is building a deck, the steady electric buzz makes that clamor sound like music. Hammers and saws become like percussion instruments. Barking dogs are transformed into a horn section. That troublesome couple having a loud argument on their front lawn are like backup singers. It all sounds fine, as long as the buzzing tree thing provides the chorus.
Meanwhile, some industrious soul is working on his lawn a block or two away. The lawn mower starts roaring at 8 a.m. Then it’s the thinner notes of a hedge trimmer and then the misty sounds of a sputtering sprinkler. By noon, if it’s the weekend, there will come an irregular CLANK, CLANK, CLANK of horseshoes getting acquainted with poles. Top it off with raucous laughter that floats across three neighborhoods and you know you’ve got a sunny summer day.
Across the street there’s an abandoned house around which the landscape has grown wild. It’s a jungle out there. And every late afternoon, you can hear the ecosystem at work. Crickets chatter non-stop, a ceaseless, staccato hum of insect conversation that makes me think the crickets have built a tiny stadium and that they spend their days watching wee versions of baseball. There’s the bird with the big vocal cords yelling SNEE! SNEE! SNEE! all day long, as if “snee” is bird talk for “you’re late for dinner again, you ungrateful oaf. Get your feathers home at once or I’ll dump all these delicious worms into the trash.”
There’s even a pleasant quality to the sound of automobile tires on hot, dry pavement. There is no squishy noise of tires fighting with slush or the crunchy sound of rubber going to war with ice. Summer is peacetime for tires and pavement. The sound of that peace is dry and soft and mellow.
On occasion, I hear the enormous, water-displacing sound of a kid doing cannonballs in a backyard pool. The faint clicks of a lawn chair being adjusted to just the right angle. Or the click and then WHOOSH of a barbecue grill being fired to life.
Don’t get me started on the scents of summer — the suntan oil, the lighter fluid, the black scent of freshly laid tar — it’s too painful to talk about with August withering on the calendar. Once September is upon us, the music of insects is replaced by the tick-tack sound of snow tires on bare roads. The smell of new mown grass gives way to the scent of woodsmoke chasing away the early evening chill.
Depressing. If you need me, I’ll be in the backyard with a safari hat and a really big net. I need to catch one of those buzzing things and make it live inside with me all winter long. If you listen carefully, you may hear the sounds of my screams as I run into a bee hive and fall out of a tree — another one of those summertime sounds you can count on year after year.
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