The One... The Only... The Vieve

Cicadas and sprinklers

August is here, deep summer. The cicadas are trilling every night--an insistent, soothing, drowsy sound. A sound like lush velvet air, languid movements, sweating beer bottles dropping dew onto the grass. It's so evocative, it's difficult to describe. Like when a smell brings back a memory or feeling so sharp and clear, but also so complex and fleeting you can't quite grasp it, and it lingers there, diffuse and shapeless.

Hearing the cicadas every night, and also just the general hum and heat of August, brings back memories of my earliest summers growing up in Pennsylvania. We were in the suburbs of Philadelphia, surrounded by quarter-acre plots planted with faux-Colonial split levels, but our 8+ acres, bought by my grandparents in the '30s from a farmer who had gone bust, was a true oasis.

I remember waking up and not worrying about school, or anything else. Eating a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios and watching Reading Rainbow in the dim chill of my grandparents' stone-floored living room while my grandmother puttered around her kitchen. Bumping my bike with the pink streamers and flowered seat down the long rocky driveway, feeling the breeze dry the sweat from my face and my brown bare legs. Stopping where the old spring house used to be, wading in the filmy water and smoothing my hands over the slippery green rocks. My sister and I would visit each clump of honeysuckle and carefully bite the base of each picked flower, giddy when we found a sweet drop of nectar instead of just the tart bite of green stem.

Playing, reading, wandering, dreaming, exploring, and thinking in the insect-chattering, blue-sky, heavy-aired days of summer. Not every day was as serene and happy as I remember it, I'm sure, but the general feeling and the memories are true. So innocent and enviable.