The sound of cicadas brings on feelings of love, safety
I spend these days teaching college writing and literature for Antioch University Online at home while tending to the advancing needs of an old toy poodle with dementia, in between tracking online deliveries and washing my hands over and over.
In short, I’m pulled in a million different directions, feel like I don’t have control over my own existence and often don’t measure up to the tasks I’m required to perform. There is always more striving for competence, if not perfection. I often feel behind and always racing to catch up.
The other night, when hurrying out to take my poodle boy for a walk at dusk, I paused when I heard the cicadas and felt the delicious rush of childhood returning.
Cicadas. My maternal grandmother called them locusts, and so did I when I was a kid because whatever Nanny did or said was OK by me. (Technically, a locust is a grasshopper.)
I don’t know why she called them locusts. Was it from her upbringing in Kentucky? Maybe the name came from the Bible. Or from Portsmouth, where she lived as an adult and where I lived with my parents until I was 3.
My parents, younger brother, and I moved to California for a short time and then settled in a Dayton suburb for the rest of my childhood. Wherever we lived, I always missed my grandparents.
I often stayed with them during the last week of August, right before school started on the Wednesday after Labor Day. I thought it was the best vacation anybody could ever have.
Nanny was not soft and cuddly. She was tough. She had been raised by a mother who didn’t believe in cuddling. When Nanny hugged, she hugged hard. She hugged all the love she could into you. She hugged like she meant it, and she hugged often.
She and I talked about everything under the sun while breaking fresh green beans and then cooking them with ham, frying potatoes, and making the all-important cornbread that I would drench in butter. Ice-cold
Barq’s root beer flowed during supper, and juicy watermelon followed.
Later, we would go to the front porch and sit on the glider “of an evening” — that’s the way Nanny would say it: “of an evening.” Sitting side by side, we would sway back and forth and back and forth.
That’s when I would hear the cicadas. I never noticed them at home, even when my friends and I were out in the evening playing. But at my grandparents’ house in Portsmouth, I was able to calm down and focus on the small things. I learned to listen and to live. The sounds of those cicadas came
All accepted essays become property of The Dispatch. Send essays by email: talking@dispatch.com to mean love.
Back then, of course, I had no idea that those front-porch moments would echo through my life, even more than 20 years after Nanny’s death.
Here we are in what I suspect is the middle — and not near the end — of a pandemic. So much has changed in all our lives, and I don’t mind telling you that I spend a good bit of my time worried and even afraid of what is to come.
But I hold on to those quiet memories Nanny made for me. I cling to them. They urge me on.
Even now, sitting in my bedroom during the day, air conditioner drowning out any sounds of nature, if I close my eyes, I can feel the soothing motion of that glider, hear the cicadas, sense my grandmother’s arms around me, and feel safe.
Lisa Geichman Prosek, 61, lives in Orange Township.