|
|
|
|
Okie Cricket Blues
Mon Aug 08, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. Today, commentator Sarah Parker recalls the sounds of sultry summer nights.
I remember summertime in Oklahoma. The nights were sometimes 20-30 degrees lower than the 100 degree humid days. I remember a slight breeze, but one didn’t always exist. Crickets so loud sometimes that you never thought you’d be able to fall asleep.
On comfortable nights, crickets sang in high pitched harmony as if they were the featured group for a swing dance--the cooler the night the happier the cricket. Other nights seemed unbearable with a hot blanket-like humidity--to sleep: an impossibility. On those nights the crickets sang a low and slow hymn. They sang about pain and sadness they sang about feelings that could never be understood or attained in a cool northern climate. These nights you lay in bed stripped to a little as possible, windows open, ceiling and oscillating fans blowing. But still you lay sweating, rolling, flailing, listening in bed trying with desperation to find a comfortable spot.
Some nights it was as though the lower and slower the crickets’ song became the louder it seemed. Their song conjured images of weeping drowning slouching crickets surround by an endless pool of sweat. The heat lay on top of you like a weight taking away all ability to get up and roam around or at least call at them to knock it off.
Now in northern New Mexico’s cool almost frigid summer nights I really miss that heat and those crickets. Today I remember their songs as slow blues whispered words slight lethargic stepped love songs.
Sarah Parker is a producer at KZRA, in Alamosa, Colorado. The Weather Notebook is generously funded by Subaru of America
|
|
