The crickets are loud outside my window, because outside my window, the grass is high. Life, in fact, in terms both general and specific, has got a lead on me, and the kind of maintenance my neighbors would like to see in my yard and which they cannot see and would not see within my home have dropped into the category "Only if it's urgent". Owning a large home and a relatively sizable parcel of land is plenty of work for a small squad of attendants, while a man alone turns in the eye of change touching what needs a touch, and leaving alone what is well enough — or as well as can be — alone.
A fringe benefit of this inability to be several people at once is that there are crickets singing every night outside my window. There must also be a number of other, larger creatures enjoying the cool height of what used to be considered a lawn, because the chirruping of the insects is frequently broken by a watching and waiting silence. Even I prick up my ears in those pauses: what is it? What is passing?
As a nod to the power of nature, I recall a time a number of years back, living in our first apartment in Porto Alegre — three small rooms on a cement inner courtyard, near the sewage canal (weren't they all sewage canals?) and a road named after General Marcílio Dias. I had not been in Brazil very long, and as I mentioned this was our first apartment, which means inexpensive and somewhere in that gray area between lower-middle-class community and fringe lack of community.
Anyway, the roar of traffic and jangling symphony of life (more like the Italian opera, actually, with its grand emotion and vivid colors) left the simple sounds of the country so far out of reach that I began to doubt their existence. Certainly the senses, and through them the mind, and beneath that the heart, and within that the soul, all suffered for the lack of nature's rhythmic calling.
At one point, we had traveled on vacation to the States… yes, I believe it was Christmas, and we had returned to my family home for a month, enduring for over half the time a cold snap of -60oF and windchill — no, that is not a typo; and yes, that is where I grew up, where my just-washed hair would freeze solid at the bus stop on the way to school, and the fiery needle-pricks of sensation returning to frostbitten fingers and toes were blasé reminders to where our mittens instead of our gloves — we had traveled to my ice-bound home and returned with two or three cassette tapes: Summer Sounds and Ocean Soundscapes. In the bunker of a South Brazilian apartment, the breeze caressed midwestern fields, the waves caressed North Atlantic sands.
Someone (from California most likely) had noticed that people slept better with a certain natural soundtrack, and took the time to go out to some field somewhere to record an hour of crickets. Then they went and sat on the beach and recorded an hour of surf. I returned home with a cornfield in one pocket, and a handful of sand in the other.
Years later, my daughter tells me she dislikes the crickets, they make her feel melancholy. As a child, I spent time in the North Dakota farmland, in the Minnesota summer, and feel blessed by the small chimes of the crickets in the grass — whether outside my window or, if I have been particularly industrious, or if I am living once again in the dense neighborhoods of Brazil, recorded on a piece of magnetic tape that caught their scratchy opera for me to listen to, again and again, until I can pretend I am somewhere I am not, pretend that he nature I wish to go on, does go on outside, singing me, unintelligibly, to sleep.