The Songs of the Season
This March, when the snow was mostly gone, my wife and I left her hometown up on the Canadian border to make the long drive home. We’d been up there for her uncle’s funeral, which left us feeling how funerals do, and we were a quiet pair. Somewhere near Poultney the road bent east away from the big lake, and dipped into a wet, lowland place. The alders stood silhouetted on either side of the blacktop, their arthritic and leafless fingers rising from wet earth. My wife pulled the car over to the shoulder, and in a whisper insisted I listen. She rolled down her window, and there it was. Peepers, Pseudacris crucifer, the tiny frogs that announce the arrival of each Vermont spring, singing their mating chorus in the dark. A thousand tiny throats, thawed and limbered with winter’s parting, were singing for each other, singing for us unknowingly, and welcoming a season that we, only now, realized we’d desperately needed. As we sat there listening, my wife smiled to herself, and I realized that with all the things that come and go, the peepers will return in song, whether we are here to listen or not.
There is a song for every season. In my New England the concert begins with peepers at ice out, woodcock and red-winged blackbirds following close behind. In April I open the door at night to let the dogs out one last time before bed, and if I wait awhile in the moonlight, I’ll hear the unmistakable “peeeeeent… peeeeeent” and then a twittering flight rising up out of the Langstaff’s meadow. The blackbirds are bolder with their pronouncements, dressed in their epaulets of red banded yellow. They sway on their branches in the sunshine and declare their arrival in a shrill “kook-a-REEEEEE”. It was the first birdsong that my older daughter learned, toddling around on her chubby feet, responding to their songs in kind.
Come summer the heat rises and settles back down with the weight of moisture, and I get lazy. The summer song is more languid, almost sensual. It’s the trill of ciacadas, the buzz of bees in their gathering, the soft sound of green leaves, the low rumble of thunderstorms way off on the horizon. Water tumbles over stones made smooth by the ages in a tinkling of chimes. Holstein cows, fat on summer pasture, seem to abandon their urgency even at milking time, and lush Timothy and alfalfa swallow up their musings. Nothing moves fast, and nothing shatters the hum, save the occasional clatter of a screen door banging home, followed by the thump of bare feet on pine boards.
In late summer the light changes and things take on a sepia tone. The sounds achieve hints of gentle melancholy, the reminder of something getting older, and brittle. As the leaves go from green to scarlet to gold, they begin to fall, and I can hear them. It’s a gentle sound but not soft. The apples fall too, thump and roll, and walking out in early morning I’ll scare a doe from where she’s eating them. She blows, bounds into the brush, stop, and blow again. In Fall I listen more carefully than ever as I ease into the woods and the waterways to take what I need to fill the winter larder. I listen in the dark for the duck wing whistle, in the popple whips for the roar of a grouse getting up and going away. I sit on upturned sap buckets and listen for the dainty steps of a buck and become amazed at how huge a squirrel can sound moving through a blanket of leaves. I hear the rifle shots echoing up and down the valley, and I wonder at the luck of others, and what fortunes of my own might be lurking just out of earshot. At night I lie in bed and hear the flying geese departing, and in my tenderest moments I wonder if I’ll be here to see them return. I say my silent prayers under the covers, when all that remains is the sound of my heartbeats, and the soft breathing of the person I love lying next to me.
Then winter. The quiet season. It’s a time locked up and clenched down, when I retreat, and I contract, more than rest. Venturing out in a snowfall, I stop long enough to hear the faintest whisper of each snowflake falling, landing on our eyelashes, gathering on spruce boughs. I think about what this sound meant when I was little, the promise of snow days off from school, the promise of holding the mittened hand of a pretty girl for the first time. In the deepest cold, the snow squeaks underfoot, dry as sand. I am forced to listen to my thoughts more closely in winter’s silences, and they can become loud, much louder than I’d like. I clench harder, and I endure.
And then one day in March, driving through some nighttime low spot, I hear my peepers again, and I am awed. And I am also reminded that I am unimportant. The sounds of the seasons turning round, and I am just the incidental audience, listening closely, and grateful for all I hear.
