——the sounds of summer——
I hear them all the time....... summer, spring, fall, winter.
It’s one of the benefits or possibly curses of getting old. You hear the insect sounds all the time.
The greatest book ever on the subject of summer and childhood is Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine”.
“For John was running, and this was terrible. Because if you ran, time ran. You yelled and screamed and raced and rolled and tumbled and all of a sudden the sun was gone and the whistle was blowing and you were on your long way home to supper. When you weren’t looking, the sun got around behind you! The only way to keep things slow was to watch everything and do nothing! You could stretch a day to three days, sure, just by watching!”
I was a kid during that time frame too. I lived in paradise - a dairy farm with creeks and woods, and I had the run of them. It was not unusual to tent camp overnight in the woods, walk 50 feet to the creek, and catch trout for breakfast. The trout would be supplemented with wild blackberries, apples, and the sweetest black cherries I have ever eaten, picked off a tree by the road.
My brother and I were usually within earshot, but if we didn’t come after first call, the conch trumpet always got our attention. I had read about the Polynesians using a conch shell for a horn. We pestered Mom to buy us one until she finally relented (I can remember they had large boxes full of them in the local grocery store). I knocked the end off of it with a lucky hammer blow, and danged if it didn’t work! Sounded like a diesel horn.
I feel sorry for my grandkids - they have no idea what they have missed.
The noises I miss are:
The whirring buzz of cicadas during a hot Texas day. I used to track the little devils down by their sound and shoot them out of a tree with my BB gun.
Folks didn’t just call in their kids for dinner. We all went out after dinner to play hide and seek in the dark or to catch ‘lightning bugs”. You’d here the kids calling the winner to “come in” after everyone else had been tagged and caught or had made it safe to base. And each family had someone call into the dark for the kids to come in and go to bed.
Whatever happened to lightning bugs? They used to be all over our neighborhood in Dallas, but now I see nary a one in Plano at night.
...and being on welfare was the height of shame.
I can still remember the summer of 1969. We had an endless game of army going on in the neighborhood. The older brothers were the Marines and all the younger brothers were the viet cong (VC). All summer long shouts of bang bang your dead while we ran through all the front yards and back yards while adult neighbors sons did the real fighting overseas. My father was a Korean War combat vet and former Marine Gunnery Sergeant. One day we found one of his old GP tents in the garage with all the wood tent poles. Turns out it was a massive 16 x 32 foot command post tent. We set it up in the front yard and my Dad laughed when he got home that night and even slept with us outside a few nights. We kept it up for at least a month that summer until mom got tired of it. One night we had at least 15 neighbor kids sleep over and the army game went on nearly 24 hours. We even broke into some of the old man’s stored “C” rations and ate them and survived. When those ran out it was tuna and crackers. It was war day and night until the neighbor had Lon Simmons or Vin Sculley on the radio blasting and we stopped to listen to the ball game