Reading Our Region

Essays from a Regional Writer

Susan Charkes enjoys hearing and telling stories, especially those involving the environment, farming, and sustainability in our region. Discover her poetic view of the outdoors and be inspired to visit the places she describes. Learn more about Susan, her writing, and even hear her podcasts at www.susancharkes.com.

Sample these selected writings:

Featured Items:

Katy-Did-It

by Susan Charkes

The heat of an August day smothers sounds like a cotton earplug. As evening falls, the warmth draws away. A breeze fans the tree leaves. A single hickory nut falls onto the ground – tumm! As if signaled, cicadas in the trees wind up for a final buzzing crescendo and decrescendo, a long slow rhythm like a meditative breathing in and out, and then they are quiet.

Now the concert begins. Into the silence, the soft trilling of ground crickets lays out an airy, delicate foundation, like a lace doily. High in the trees, the true katydids begin singing, tentatively, singly, then in call and response: katydid, katydidn’t. The sounds intersect and coalesce, break apart and converge. From shrubs lower to the ground, a sound like a dowel being scraped across a wooden ridged cylinder – the bush katydid’s call – intermittently punctuates the chorus. From the same vicinity, the broad-winged katydid gives out a bleating rattle, pausing briefly, the way a snorer does. Assorted tree cricket songs – chains of chirps, some long, some short – filter down from above, underlining here, filling in the gaps there.

One note is insufficient for a song, one beat alone is not a rhythm. One katydid maketh not a summer’s night. The polyrhythms of the night arise not from the songs of individual insects, but from the synchronizing of each song into a chorus. Like waves breaking upon a beach, the layers form and reform, intersect with a crashing roar, then die down. Crickets singing near each other follow a leader, so their choruses augment the individual voices into a mass. Katydids, on the other hand, time their calls so as to avoid synchronizing with an adjacent individual, so their choruses have a regular, two-part character.

As I sit motionless beneath the choir, the sound bounces from tree to tree above my head: a continuous rocking back and forth, back and forth, one-two, one-two. The rhythm of footsteps. I step out, walking down the road, under the arch of trees that are echoing katydid, katydidn’t. As I gain speed, one-two, one-two becomes one-one, two-two, my motion blurring the beat, until I am in an open treeless space and the sound fades.

Moonrise, a smoldering coal suspended in the sky above, holds me in my tracks. Next to the Moon, Mars glows like a spark thrown off from the glowing ember. The waxing and waning of the Moon describes the rhythm of months. By the end of this month, Mars will be closer to Earth than it has been in 67,000 years. This is the rhythm of the universe, played out in time spans too large to be comprehended.

Within the long, slow pulse of the intersecting planetary orbits, which encircle the annual return of each season, which enclose the monthly circuit of the moon, which surrounds the daily rhythm of the earth turning from light to darkness, time passes. Now the heat of the day’s sun is a memory; as night cools the air, the insect songs slow down, their pitch lowers. The slow cadence fills the air, throbs against the ground, and under my walking feet, one-two, one-two, and then into my heart. Ba-dum, ba-dum. Katydid, katydidn’t.