Summer Music

By Peter Bowden


The cicadas began before the heat rose, a slow chorus swelling in the shadows of the pecan trees. They sang in waves, invisible and endless, as though the earth itself was humming some ancient, restless hymn. You could feel it in your chest, the vibration of their wings, the insistence that summer was here and would not be hurried away.

By noon the air was heavy, thick with the scent of cut grass and dust, the cicadas unbroken in their music. Old men on porches nodded to the rhythm, remembering other summers when the same song spilled from the trees, unchanged, unaging. Children played barefoot in the yard, their laughter carried off like dandelion seeds, drifting somewhere into the sound.

When night came, the chorus eased, not ending but folding into the darkness. The air cooled, and the stars rose like pale lanterns above the fields. In the stillness between calls, you could almost believe the cicadas had burrowed back into the earth, carrying with them the memory of another day, waiting for the sun to rise so the song could begin again.


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