Tonight is
the night.
I step outside, barefoot on a lawn
soft as grave dirt, to inhale the faintly piquant lemon of magnolias and hear the
frog song. A thousand chirring, peeping, cheering voices that hold me enthrall,
errands forgotten, while all the summers of my life shuttle past, swift and
rolling as the downhill rush of a spring-fed creek.
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| Copyright Steve Polatnick |
“They’re
here,” my mother, daughter, grandmother would say – day gentling into evening,
a sky the color of tea roses and violets, and through it all, the song.
“Summer’s coming.”
Oh, summer.
The languid air in the valley has a presence that is very nearly tangible, and
is at least half made-up of memory. My mother played in this yard as a little
girl in the years just following the Great Depression. Hair in a smooth Scout
Finch bob, neat patches on her cotton dress, fingers blackberry-stained. The
frog song brings the little girl back, and I can see her almost as plainly as I
see my own children –
Here in the
same yard, beneath the magnolia, and trailing up the hill after lightning bugs,
their shouts jubilant enough to puncture the soul, to suck the heart out.
I think
that the happiest moments in our lives are overlaid with the deepest sorrow, as
though we need to experience the depth of one in order to feel the other. Time
wounds us, always, simply by its forward motion.
But anyway.
Who on
earth first applied the word “croak” to that sound? And could it be further
from the truth?
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