Cricket Song

From the Porch

By Amber Nagle

Some thing stirred me awake at 4 a.m. I rolled over and snuggled deeper into the sheets, careful not to disturb my husband. Through our slightly open bedroom windows, I could hear the chorus of crickets outside—like a white noise lullaby, pulling me back toward sleep. My mind wandered away chasing an ancient memory.

I was maybe five or six years old, sitting on the embankment of Papa Lanier’s pond just outside Metter, Georgia, my legs stretched out before me and my feet capped with little blue Keds. My father, Herman Lanier, sat beside me—both of us gripping cane fishing poles that seemed as tall as skyscrapers to my little hazel eyes. Between us rested a small tacklebox and an old cricket basket—a simple wire-mesh contraption that held eight or ten crickets wandering around its screen walls, their tiny legs searching for an escape route.

In those days, my fishing gear consisted of nothing more than a pole, some line, a cork bobber, and a small hook. While the teenagers and adults around me whipped their rods with lures as flashy as dangly earrings, I was perfectly content with my primitive setup and a black cricket or wiggly worm for bait. I caught my fair share of bream that way—though half of them were barely bigger than silver dollars. Holding them in such a way that their sharp fins didn’t stab me, I’d look deeply into their big, round, glassy eyes and fling them back into the water only to catch another of the same size minutes later.

I remember the smell of the fresh country air mixed with the smoke of my father’s Winston. I remember how schools of minnows darted through the shallows near us, how slimy green algae swayed on the pond’s bottom like underwater grass, and how those towering pines cast their shadows over our bodies. All of that seems like a lifetime ago. At the center of my memory sits my father—gone since 1992, but larger than life back then. Also important in the flashback is the simple cricket basket he used to haul live bait to and from his fishing spots.

Sometimes, that basket came home with him with a few surviving crickets still rattling around inside. Sometimes, Daddy just let the little fellows go free. Years later, when we had started to collect farm animals on Lake Placid Drive in Bonaire, our free-roaming chickens would chase them all over the back yard in a mad dash, cackling maniacally as they sprinted across the green lawn. Other times, my father would store the tiny cage out on the patio. One eve- continued from page

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.