Sound of Crickets

When I was younger I used to visit family in the midwest. Usually at Christmas, but also sometimes during the summer. I’ll never forget how striking the differences were between where I lived in the south and where my cousins grew up. At night, there were crickets and fireflies. Not just a few, but it seemed like swarms of them. The grass smelled amazing and it was soft to walk on. It was the kind of grass you could lay down in and stare up at the stars. I’ll never forget playing hide and seek at dusk and then into the dark of night. Crickets singing, fireflies punctuating the sky and the smells of summer, charcoal grills and the faint scent of chlorine always clinging to your skin. There was always family around when we would come to visit. It’s the reason we would visit. There were always reasons, occasions, to get together. Being the ones out of town, the reason was usually us. I remember being almost jealous, wishing I could live near them all the time. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized that it wasn’t like that, if you did live there all the time. But there isn’t much point in convincing a child that something really isn’t quite as magical as it seems. The funny thing is that once I moved back, and once I started to raise a family here, it was the same kind of magical feeling. The air, the sounds of night, the feeling of the neighborhoods. It never really changed. Which is comforting. Just like listening to crickets and the smell of our still damp grass. It’s a nice memory, the kind that bleeds into the present. The kind that never really ends.