Sit With Me

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Gryllus_pennsylvanicus#/media/File:Gryllus_pennsylvanicus_male_01.jpg

Sit with me here in the easy darkness at the deathbed of Summer. He dies every September, some years in a dramatic tempest, others with only a quiet withering. This year a feverish east wind with temperatures in the nineties caused a wildfire in the Cascades to explode, sending a broad river of smoke flowing into the Coast Range. That afternoon my grandsons and I watched Sun transform into a red clot stuck to a gray curtain of sky. Two days later the winds changed, bringing alligator skin clouds and plummeting temperatures. Tonight at 8 p.m. the Season of Anxiety began marking his last breaths with a gentle patter of rain.

Now the rain has stopped. But don’t go. Sit with me and listen to the undaunted chorus of fall field crickets. Thousands of males stridulating to attract females make waves of sound that pulsate like the rollick and roll of water undulating just downstream of a churning rapid. We could wait for the rain to return, feel the cool seep of air easing off the meadow and onto the front porch, the way it registers on bare fingers spread across journal paper.

I hope you don’t mind--I’m wearing my father’s insulated camouflage jacket. Earlier in the evening, the rain made me shiver (at least I thought it was the rain). I was drawn to the prospect of padded insulation and a warm hood, drawn to my father and an image of him wearing the jacket with the hood dropped back, thin hair protected by a billed cap, his face covered with the gray beard he died with. He is not smiling. By then his life had grown hard, and joy had mostly vanished. He doesn’t need to stay warm now and would appreciate that I do.

Stay awhile. Listen to the riffle of cricket song while we puzzle together over the mystery of September. I understand the basics: a shifting orientation of Earth to Sun that causes longer nights, cooler days, the jet stream drifting south, a shift in ocean currents, and bright yellow and red splotches of vine maple leaves. But the emotional depth of September seems fathomless. That last slice of summer slid onto my dessert plate, a final taste of hot days and cool creek water just warm enough for swimming. All of it carries a stoic sadness. While you’re here, maybe you could help me stretch beyond the feeling that September marks the season when dying begins. Teach me to reach beyond these few weeks and outward into a lifetime, into a universe. Help me embrace the cycles of living as we perch by the deathbed of summer with field crickets serenading like harp song.

Maybe you could hold my hand. It isn’t a big hand. A little calloused from gardening and woodcutting and DYI house projects, fingers stiffening with six decades of chainsaws and computer keyboards and a short stint with a jackhammer. Sometimes I feel lonely sitting in the dark, even in the company of thousands of crickets and the occasional dog barking from across the valley. You could hold my hand in that loose and gentle way that we hold the hands of the dying. The way that allows one or the other to depart at any time. We could wait together for the rain to resume, for the whisper of Summer’s last breath. Night air would slip between our fingers. Our hands would not sweat.