ANOTHER CICADA SONG

Summer is the time of the cicadas, and I've always loved the sound of their repetitious songs. However, as one who is afflicted with tinnitus (ringing or buzzing in the ears), I feel like an aging character in one of E. B. White's essays that appeared in the New Yorker: "A friend of ours...tells us that at this season it is almost impossible, walking or riding in the country, to distinguish between the poetry of earth and the racket inside his own head..." But when the cicadas emerge from their underground hideouts, I can distinguish a slight difference between the monotonous buzz in my ears and the symphonies that they composed in parts of Tennessee this summer.

The male cicada does most of the singing, using tymbals (not to be confused with cymbals), membranes that vibrate when muscles are pulled, especially when the males are out romancing. Sometimes they create songs by flicking their wings, but the female cicada makes this motion more often than the male. I've read that these "courting calls" are highly effective, but infrequently they're just distress signals when the insect thinks it's going to become the meal of a predator.

Many times, we hear entire symphonies created by cicadas—choruses composed and sung by male cicadas when they decide that if they get together and sing, a full symphony will attract females more readily than a solo. They synchronize with their tymbals, and the roaring sound is not unlike the strains of a Phillip Glass composition. Whatever the intent of these buzzing insects, I can detect this slight differentiation between their romantic rhapsodies and the tinnitus of old age humming in my ears.

I always welcome a Cicada Chorus that signals the beginning of some summers, but this year I've been looking forward to the finale of dog days as we've had too many hours of heat, even here on The Mountain. When I see the curled yellow leaves of basil in my herb garden, I realize that the sultry season is nearing an end. I also know that the eggs of the singing cicadas that fell out of the trees have hatched and gone underground for a long winter nap—sometimes for 13 or 17 years.

But my ears keep buzzing!

A poem from Old Ridges written during my third summer at Sewanee:

Resurrection

The old woman sunning in the garden

scorns locusts, the singing insects,

complaining they are God's plague,

forever tuning up and having

only one note in their score,

practicing the sound

until it becomes no music

but a ritornello of torture

offending her scale of joy.

She cannot know

they bury themselves

underground for seventeen years

of solitude and prayer

before bursting through decay and loam

to sing the aria of resurrection,

enchanted with that one note

loosely translated as light.

FOR RETIREES (OR ANYONE ELSE FOR THAT MATTER)

I'm not one to broadcast what one calls "smarmy information," but I do appreciate a more simplistic way of living as I approach my 80th year this month. This morning, I went outside to check on the progress of a small garden planted recently, and a headline appeared in my mind: "How to "Make Contented." And within five minutes, I had written the recipe, which I share with those of you old enough to appreciate simple notions of living well:

-Plant a herb garden and when the crop appears, use the products in salads daily, remembering how you felt when you saw the first green shoot. Think about how happy it looked;
-Talk to your adult children via telephone, or e-mail them, or send them a card with a handwritten message of love weekly (or daily, if you can). Tell them the birth pains they caused were worth every wrenching moment;

-Each morning tell your significant other or spouse or partner how good life is because you share it with them;
-Get out of bed at daylight and go out on the porch to feel the breath of the universe on your face. If the weather is breezy, go back indoors and stand in front of an old-fashioned space heater to warm your backside;
-Pray for everyone you love and for those who suffer in "mind, body, or spirit." Put yourself at the bottom of your list (but don't neglect self). If you're inclined to meditate, spend at least twenty minutes at this practice. Read the Book of Psalms aloud and try writing your own versions of psalms;
-Unless you're subject to asthma attacks triggered by laughter, laugh a lot and don't be self-conscious about cackling. Tell amusing stories to anyone who will listen to you;
-Read or write one poem a week; peruse one book a month; and keep the best literature beside your bed;
-Eat food that does not come from packages or cans and subscribe to a magazine like The Cook's Illustrated Cookbook: 2,000 Recipes from 20 Years of America's Most Trusted Cooking Magazine
to learn why food needs to be prepared with as much love as your prayers for spiritual growth;
-Eat one small block of dark chocolate three times a week and let it stay in your mouth a few seconds before chewing it and swallowing;

-Drink four ounces of wine before your evening meal unless you've abused this practice;
-Avoid obsessing about the thin man look; just eat healthy and "don't ride on the back of the Ass of Diet/ or feed on the fatback of judgment./ Tend to the sovereignty of the soul..."*;
-See how many medications you can discard and substitute with well-prepared food, eight hours of sleep, and a walk three times a week;
-Even if you don't practice the religion, read Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health and appreciate her devotion to the health of the mind and spirit;
-Show your appreciation for animals, even if you're allergic to animal dander; and if you're not, get a dog or cat and keep it close, vacuuming regularly, in case someone who is allergic to all that hair visits you;
-Find an infant's face in the crowd whenever you shop or eat out and smile at it. Keep staring at it for five minutes and pick it up if the mother allows;

Grandson, Alex Romero
as baby

-Listen to and commiserate with at least one person who relates a "tale of woe" three times a week; reminding that person and yourself of all the blessings of this life, and ask a higher power to bless that person who has related the "tale of woe." Practice empathy;
-Do at least one act of volunteer service a week;
-Listen to Mozart often. And if you don't like Mozart or Beethoven or Tchaikovsky, listen to progressive jazz or Phillip Glass or the Beatles;
-Try opera, even if you laugh when you're supposed to be appreciating the tragic. Watch a soap opera now and then, if only to find a point of identification with the characters;
-Hang art on every wall in your house and celebrate it every day;
-Set your table with all that china and silver you've been hoarding and invite friends over for dinner at least once a month;
-Go to the mountains or the ocean every three months and find a "thin place" where you can access the sacred and the heaven within you, and free yourself of discord;
-Be honest, even if you lose face;
-Know that you're evolving toward happiness and union with a Creative Intelligence;
-Think harmony, do good, and be content;
-Know that this list isn't complete but will do for starters on "making contented;"
-Be glad you're on this side of the grass and that you're here, NOW.

*from A Lonely Grandmother by Diane-Marquart-Moore

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan

MORE NOTES ON WINTER

Backyard at dusk, Sewanee

Slowly, ever so slowly, the quiet snow is melting on The Mountain, and its white luster subsides. Still, the air is sharp, and the sun struggles to appear, reminding me of its struggle to shine as it did when I lived in New England fifty years ago.

Today, we went to lunch at Crossroads Restaurant with our good friend, Kathy Hamman, editor and co-publisher of Plateau Press in Sewanee, Tennessee and shivered in the huge barnlike place that was once the site of Sewanee Cleaners, huddling close to a woodstove and warming ourselves on lentil soup and Chinese Oolong tea—delicious wintry pleasures.

When I reached home following lunch, I had an impulse to listen to "Songs From Liquid Days" by Phillip Glass, an album that Glass put together with lyricists Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega, David Byrne, and Laurie Anderson. I was drawn to listen to a piece called "Freezing" with vocals by Suzanne Vega and Linda Ronstadt, which ends with the words: "And now I'm freezing/Freezing." The lyrics seemed compatible with the below freezing weather outside my window.

I had been reading E. B. White's account of a trip to China Lake when he, his wife, and young son were stranded in a village in New England during a snowstorm sans nightclothes. White had chosen to sleep in sweater and socks, his wife in a coonskin coat, and his son in a suit of "heavies" with a sweater on his legs. White wrote that his wife arose in the night and told him that it was impossible to sleep in a coonskin coat. I laughed aloud, as I had awakened, perspiring, in pajamas and a long-sleeve fuzzy bed jacket last night, while the temperatures dipped to eight degrees outdoors.

This morning, there were animal tracks on the snow-covered drive and in the snow piled on our front porch, and I wondered what freezing critters had come to visit, looking for warmth and finding inhospitable hostesses. We've sealed off the crawl space under the cottage that skunks inhabited last winter; boarded up the entries to the attic where chipmunks once snuggled down for the season; the deer have been culled, and, in general, our wildlife population has diminished for the duration.

Life's problems seem minimal when we look out and see icicles hanging from the roof. Our thoughts are reduced to the major problem of keeping warm, and we dream of warmer climes like the Caribbean tropics, of being at peace with winter storms.

Monday we'll return to "tropical" Louisiana that has also been assailed by Arctic storms—a place where temps are usually sultry, but where my son-in-law jackknifed his van on icy Darby Lane yesterday morning. Schools in New Iberia have been closed, and State offices have been shut down for three days. We hope for forty and fifty degree weather and for the balm of sunny days upon our return.

With the country swathed in cold and ice, I reflect on Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice:"

"Some say the world will end in fire.

Some say in ice.

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if I had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction, ice

Is also great

And would suffice."

Wherever you are, stay warm and well. As another poet said, "If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"