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ning, though, he hung that cricket basket on a hook in the laundry room—just off of our kitchen. Later that night, we were treated to a full serenade of cricket songs echoing through the house. It’s funny—the things our memory preserves for an eternity.

I don’t know what kind of crickets were in the mesh box, because I’m no entomologist. I’ve read that cricket songs vary from one cricket to another, and folks who study these creatures can tell you exactly what kind of cricket you’ve got in your backyard just by listening to their chirp (though to my ears, it sounds more like buzzing than chirping). These little male musicians chirp to attract girlfriends to the party. They sing with their wings, rubbing ridges together to create that signature sound.

And their cyclic mating calls have been serving as nature’s thermometers for generations. Since they’re cold-blooded insects, their chirping rate increases with rising temperatures—a relationship called Dolbear’s Law, named after physicist Amos Dolbear, who wrote about it in 1897, noting that you can estimate the temperature in Fahrenheit by counting cricket chirps in a 14-second interval and adding 40 to that number. Don’t make any bets on that, though, because his formula doesn’t work with every kind of cricket.

For many people, hearing a chorus of crickets is the hallmark of warm summer nights and the fall mornings that coincide with harvest time. It’s certainly a sound that takes me back to childhood, camping in a tent or sleeping with our windows wide open—Mom’s thin cotton curtains ballooning out in the occasional breeze like lungs taking in a deep breath of air.

We were recently visiting family in a remote region of Colorado, where it was so quiet and peaceful that you could’ve heard a pin drop—the sounds of cars and leaf blowers were virtually nonexistent in South Fork. And rising above the silence of the great nothingness there, we heard one or two lovecrazed crickets—such a soothing sound to me, one that reminds me of childhood and home.

The other night, that cricket song lulled me back to sleep like a drug, but not before carrying me back through the decades— back to Papa Lanier’s pond, back to my father’s hands guiding mine on a long cane pole, back to that simple wire basket that held such small creatures capable of such large memories. Those crickets singing outside my bedroom window weren’t just calling for a mate or marking the temperature outside, they were calling to me—to me— calling me home to who I’ve always been: just a girl who notices, appreciates, and celebrates the wonder of nature and one who longs desperately for loved ones who have passed. May the soundtrack of my childhood never fade away. Amen.