Summer Song Refrain

I made one of my semiannual treks to Louisville a couple weeks ago. The whirring of the cicadas filled the air. There are lots more cicadas where I grew up than where I live now. Their song is part of the soundtrack of my youth. [There are more lightning bugs there too, but that's another story....]

Elizabethtown is about an hour south of Louisville. [We always call it E-town, not that it matters....] The Cameron Crowe movie [supposedly] based there was pretty mediocre in my opinion. I found the errors in geography especially distracting.

[rant]Yeah, I know… movies require suspension of disbelief. I suppose exit 60-B was intended to be a comic device. (And it’s really exit 94 anyway; you can even see that in the film.) But Drew (Orlando Bloom) didn’t miss an exit so much as he drove in the wrong direction! I guess taking a wrong turn out of the airport is not as funny as missing an exit later…. And cute young flight attendants that give out their phone numbers to help with directions? Now that’s southern hospitality! I would say that I clearly fly the wrong airlines but you could as easily point out that I am clearly nowhere near as good looking as Orlando Bloom….[end rant]

Anyway, when Drew stepped out of his car after [finally] making his way into E-town the cicadas were there in force. It sounded just like home. “Wow. He nailed that,” I remember thinking at the time. And then… well you’ve probably seen it already. At least it had a good soundtrack.

Summer Song

When spring yields to summer, insects renew their annual concerts. Warm evenings bring cricket chirps — their frequency an unofficial, but accurate, thermometer. June bugs and bumble bees buzz around sunny days and katydids chime in with their urgent tirades. “Katy did… Katy didn’t….”

Come the dog days cicadas are in full “voice”, their whirring almost constant. Their cacophony is truly deafening. Ounce for ounce, I suppose they must be the loudest creatures on earth. Anatomy is all that keeps the bullfrogs from hanging their heads in shame…. [A few species of cicadas are notorious for a 17-year life cycle. After all those years underground they emerge to mate and die in a few short weeks. But there are many more species with life cycles of only one year or a few years.]

At dusk, the light show starts. Lightning bugs blink in the failing light. Deepening shadows fill in and before you know it the show has moved higher — stars peer down and chase away the last outrageous rays of the sun. And still the cicadas insist, “Here here here here here here here here here here….” Pick me.