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birds fly from the river bank to a hole in a dead tree standing in the water. I lured scolding White-eyed Vireos to show me their hanging, basket-like nests by standing motionless when they first voiced disapproval at my presence. It was a moment of exhilaration when the sassy, yellow tinged bird went to her nest and fed the young. Now, in the mountains of Virginia, I hear the throb of cicada and relive those days.
August days cool into a long, lingering twilight. With darkness, spangled with yellow green flashes from fireflies, insects of the night begin their scrapings and chirpings.
Katydids call incessantly, over and over. It is a reassuring, husky sound and the night throbs with their announcements.
Katydids proclaim dense August nights just as cicadas inform of days of breathless heat. The exuberance of spring bird song is a fragment of memory. Now only the Indigo Bunting sings when the sun is high overhead. He is a sole, solitary singer, accompanied only by insect sounds.
The now of nature erases the past. How difficult it is to conjure up a tree with new, yellow-green leaves. Those leaves, now a dull, dusty green, hang limp and motionless in the August heat.
I no longer wish for endless summer. Cool nights in late September are difficult for me to summon in memory; yet they are there, embedded in my years. They are a prelude. to October with its flaming foliage.
For now I happily give the world over to the insects; they are everywhere and the heat seems to activate them as it saps and slows my impulse to move. I watch a wasp in my vegetable garden; his delicate body twitches with life as he flies from one leaf to another in agitated search of some prey. Amts patrol with mindless intensity. Butterflies flit and bounce through the air with some purpose that escapes me. The August world of insects' reminds me of how little I know and understand of the creatures with six legs. The heat that energizes them keeps me still. I watch and wonder through the eighth month.
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