Spinning Yarns

Fall is coming, I can feel it. It’s not merely that September is hard upon us, or that the sweltering heat that hung leaden upon so many of July’s long days has broken; the whole world has drawn a breath, and begun to turn the corner. The stars glitter sharp and bright against an impossible liquid sky, the night breeze has begun to chill, and the blood-sucking insects have vanished from the woods — all of these are harbingers of the annual twilight.

The most direct and forthright sign of Fall, for me, is none of these things, however — it is the coming of the crickets. Those of you who know me should feel free to laugh — for anyone who has seen a man stalking the elusive insects in the dead of night has had more than enough cause for levity, I can assure you! The crickets choose this time of year to come into my home, without so much as a by-your-leave, and take up residence in the tiny gaps between the heat-registers and the wall.

At first, I showed great patience for my little nocturnal singers; after all, they don’t eat much, and anyway, they’re supposed to be good luck. Even when I would find one scampering about on the wall or in among the potted plants, I would catch it in a plastic cup, tossing it to freedom in the cow pasture across the road.

However, it does not take too many nights of hearing a cricket chirping behind the heat register in your bedroom to exhaust even the deepest wells of the milk of human kindness. For it is not enough for a cricket merely to chirp (and as anyone who has heard them can attest, a really genetically superior model can drill holes in your eardrums at ten paces); no, indeed — they put all manner of “variations” on it (as Mark Twain would have it), which additions render the whole business well nigh intolerable, especially when you are trying to sleep.

Figuring they’d be happier outdoors anyway, that being a much better place to find a date on any given Saturday, I made several vain attempts to coax them out of hiding so that I could escort them home. Rapping on the register made them shut up just long enough that you would figure they’d run away — and then they’d light up with a chorus as painful as a whole row of violists trying to play in tune. After a few hours of this, I fetched forth the vacuum cleaner, and sent them to the Hell of Dusty Grick. Luck be damned.

They did not rest at this, however; the crickets were wholly undaunted and, what’s more, without remorse. A few nights later I chased down literally eleven different crickets. By the third or fourth, I was just swatting the buggers with a fly-swatter. A few wouldn’t come out, so I chased them out with a spray-bottle of stove-top cleaner, which had the pleasant coincidental effect of taking the gunk out of the corners.

Anyway, the point of all this is, they come in every year at around about this time, and so to me, it’s the first real sign that the summer has begun to consider trading her bright sun-dresses for the warm, heavy folds of her russet autumn cloak. In a funny way, because I live in the academic world, autumn is the time of renewal, and it’s spring that is the time of partings and sorrow.

In a few weeks, a new freshman class will arrive on campus — you can always tell the freshmen, they’re the ones who go around trying not to look as if they’re freshmen — and then classes will begin. I look forward to the excitement of a new term; new energies and challenges, mixed with the return and resumption of the old ones, and all the while the air growing crisp and cool like the first bite of a new apple after a long day’s hike. Amber August will give way to red-golden September, anon to the bleaking umber October, and grey-brown November … and whither then? I cannot say.

The coming months are laden with the fruit of possibility, or perhaps the stones of responsibility. This summer has sown many seeds into the furrows of my life (not to mention my brow), and I feel that great changes are coming when I reap them. But all of that is just a fancy way of saying, change is afoot in my life, and I’m more than a little apprehensive about where it all will lead.

Filed by Michael at 15:24 under Personal, Story
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