A Loss For Words

I’m curiously at a loss for words this week, which is ironic given the theme of my latest project.  And perhaps I should save this post for Write On Wednesday, especially given the way I’m feeling right now, which is virtually inspiration-less.

But I’m sitting here at my dining room table, the window pushed open full tilt, the backyard grass dappled with shadows from the red maple tree, the one I’ll never cut down no matter how dangerously close to the house it grows, and I hear the cicadas for the first time this summer.  I usually connect them with really hot weather, that murderous, relentless heat which sometimes comes late in July and August, the kind of weather that always surprises Michiganders, offends us I think, since we’re used to the general temperance of this state’s climate in summer.  But they’re out there singing already, or whatever it is cicadas do, that incessant buzz which crescendos to a fever pitch before it stops, suddently, as if someone has clamped a lid on it. 

 I sit, and stare, chin propped on my hand, and let the sound of cicadas wash over me.  I watch a butterfly flit merrily to and fro in the tall grass of the orchard, and notice a friend join him as they swoop easily among the weeds.  My eyes are drawn upward, past the stand of pines whose tips are completely invisible, nearly tall enough to poke the fat bellies of those cumulus clouds stalled overhead, and out beyond the first fence toward the poplar tree, whose branches ripple like waves in the azure sky.  Their soughing reaches the house, a gentle shush of sound, whose wake sets my wind chimes in motion, their alto notes a gentle a-minor chord progression, a monkish call to worship from some early age.

I am calmed, and soothed, and eased.

So, who needs words?