In the last few days, the humidity here has almost disappeared– the humidity that all summer hangs like gauze in the air and on my body, so that out for a walk or even going to the car I feel I’m wearing a shirt I don’t remember putting on. But sometime on Sunday evening the gauze was rolled up and heaved, I am guessing, onto a shelf in some celestial attic somewhere. It will likely make a reappearance before autumn sets in for good, but we all sense the change and know it’s coming now.
You hear them, too, as soon as you step outside, or even through the open window which you can now (mercifully) leave open all night: the crickets, singing day and night invisibly from the grass. Their song always sounds like bells to me– the Christmas kind– a steady jingle in the lower registers. And it sounds, too, like other autumns, older ones, ones in Pittsburgh when I was a child, and this makes me wonder if in Pittsburgh summers the crickets sing all day or if, like here, the song comes as a harbinger of fall. I don’t remember.
My next-door neighbor in Pittsburgh, Mrs. Ramsay (every summer I used to cut some of my mother’s roses and take them to her, wrapping their stems carefully in damp paper towels; she was beautiful and terribly old and had exquisitely smooth skin and white hair and wore dresses), said once that summer seemed to end– no matter what the date was– just as soon as school started. She said the shadows were suddenly longer on the first day the school bus came. We would walk past her house to the busstop.
And now the humidity is gone and the crickets are singing and it’s been twenty-two years since I’ve ridden a school bus. And all along my driveway– just quietly there– the roses are blooming again.
