Silent No More

It’s weird enough for me. I mean, it’s the kind of weird that only I seem to notice. Since writing my post “Silent Summer,” it seems like a spell or something has been broken. Last Friday, the sounds of summer returned. A few moments ago, I heard an owl. Gradually, all of the pieces of the summer symphony nature performs have been added to the area.

At first, crickets and a single cicada. Over the past week, more of them. Tonight, the full orchestra is putting on a grand show. It’s good to hear.

Funny, the things we take for granted. Until something is gone, you never really appreciate it. We humans, we’re an ungrateful bunch.

But this leaves a mystery unsolved: what caused the eerie, deathly silence in the first place, and how could it have lasted for so long? My next door neighbor actually talked about it with me, so I’m not questioning myself.

It was there. Silence in the surrounding area during summer, with stands of trees and patches of forest so close, is a sign of danger. If you’re in or near the woods and everything gets quiet, and you’re not making a lot of noise, you are not the cause. Even crickets within a yard will chirp again if you’re there and standing still. But to have the woods go quiet as far as you can hear, you need to get out and make tracks on home.

I don’t have the answer to the mystery. I took it as a bad sign, an omen perhaps, and now I believe that apex predators were in the are. I had a bad feeling, there was a heaviness in the air. What silences a forest?

It could have been weather related, but I never saw anything like this, and around here, crickets and cicadas will perform all the way past October. Especially crickets, though if the temperature drops low enough, their chirping is slower, but this, I’ve never seen in summer.

If not weather, how about something geological? I’m not aware of anything significant. I do believe there were things out there in the darkness, lots of them, over a vast area, which I sensed and which made the night quiet and slightly frightening. I have a few horrible guesses what they could be, but for now, I’m not sweating it.

The sounds of summer are back.