I think I’m going to sleep in, but the phone rings at 6:30 a.m. Bleary eyed, I answer, and even though I can’t think straight yet, I’m glad. It’s a friend who is out of the country for her daughter’s wedding, and I’m glad to have contact with her on this special day. Then, a walk with Charlie and a visit from a friend, and a visit at a funeral home of a childhood friend’s mother’s memorial––wow, kindergarten friends greet me in the lobby. Mrs. Wicks, the deceased woman, was a friend of my mother’s. They were very much a part of each other’s support system as mothers. It’s sweet to be able to be there and remember childhood and give hugs to my friends who have lost their mother. Tonight, a lovely dinner with friends who we went to Croatia with. I drive home feeling so grateful for an evening of laughter and conversation.

I found this wonderful article this morning, this essay in the NYTimes by Lewis Hyde about crickets and the seasons, and he’s so articulate about what I’ve been feeling about the cricket’s song, and have not had the imagination or mind or craft to say. He’s said so enchantingly:

But for Thoreau, the New England cricket’s is a pulsing song and the pressure of time is but one of its beats. Books must get written, yes, and a neighbor’s land surveyed for pocket money, but time in all such cases belongs to the singular and irreversible “seasons” of history, not to the seasons of nature which, like the phases of the moon, repeat again and again. Spring, summer, fall and winter — our seasons are spun into being by the earth circling the sun; the earth herself, however, is not seasonal. Taking that larger view allows Thoreau, in the second part of his fable, to reframe the cricket’s song as an “earth song,” a reminder not of life’s brevity but of eternal return. The solar year is under the crickets’ command, he declares, and the sound we hear on these cool September nights is not seasonal, it’s “the creaking of the earth’s axle.”

In one telling passage, Thoreau follows his claim that the crickets “sit aside from the revolution of the seasons” with what feels like a logical consequence: “only in their saner moments,” he says, “do men hear the crickets.” And of what does such sanity consist? Of having no “trivial and hurried pursuits.” Of having “your engagements so few, your attention so free, your existence so mundane” that you can always hear their song. Above all, sanity means knowing that, freed from seasonal hurry, you have all the time in the world to finish your task, to let your talent mature.

One mark of a durable fable is its ability to contain a contradiction without resolving it. In this case we have conflicting ways to hear the creaking of the crickets and both are true: time is limited and time is endless; you must get to work and you may relax. Thoreau was clearly familiar with both states of mind.