Except it comes from the sun

Delicious pumpkin pie recipes, thank you, thank you – I can’t wait to try them out. And I loved reading through blogs and hearing all about meals and family reunions that were peaceful and joyours and characterised by gratitude. In sobriety so much becomes possible.

November in the Overberg and the cicadas have tunneled up from underground and are everywhere, dropping into pots on the stove, jugs of unpasteurised milk and the dogs’ drinking bowls. Rescuing cicadas keeps me busy. I checked my diary notes and there are many more cicadas than last year, perhaps because of the dryness. (Intermittent drought and water shortages here and in the Karoo, with residents of Beaufort West restricted to only getting running water every 30 hours.)

The cicadas here are Platypleura (there are 150 species of cicada in southern Africa) and the thrumming or buzzing noise comes from the male cicadas contracting their timbal muscles while the abdomen cavity serves as a resonating chamber. As well as the mating song that increases in volume the hotter it gets (cicadas love dry heat), they have a very distinctive distress call that is like short sharp bursts of morse. To sit out under trees and listen to cicadas on summer nights is for me the sound of summer.

This evening a summer picnic with friends on a nearby farm. Which means, moonlight, firelight, good conversation and mosquito bites. Packing Tabard insect repellent and a handful of citronella candles.

Singing a poem by Wallace Stevens to myself as I shower, lines that echo and dance in the imagination. Cicadas singing in the liquidambar tree, friends flying north for family Christmasses, a year of loves and losses, a decade into the new century, a time of blessings.

Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu

That would be waving and that would be crying,
Crying and shouting and meaning farewell,
Farewell in the eyes and farewell at the centre,
Just to stand still without moving a hand.

In a world without heaven to follow, the stops
Would be endings, more poignant than partings, profounder,
And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell,
Just to be there and just to behold.

To be one’s singular self, to despise
The being that yielded so little, acquired
So little, too little to care, to turn
to the ever-jubilant weather, to sip

One’s cup and never to say a word,
Or to sleep or just to lie there still,
Just to be there, just to be beheld,
That would be bidding farewell, be bidding farewell.

One likes to practice the thing. They practice,
Enough, for heaven. Ever-jubilant,
What is there here but weather, what spirit
Have I except it comes from the sun?

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