We tend to think about the annual third quarter with chores that need to be addressed. Chores like “back-to-school” preparations, harvesting and canning summer’s fruit and vegetable bounties, raking leaves, packing away summer beach bags and clothes. It is a time to turn our sights once again to the hectic routines of the approaching change of season. We mark our calendars - as deciduous trees soon to change their colors from summer greens into every imaginable shade of autumn green, bright gold, orange, and cranberry.
For me, the telltale sign that summer is about to pass its seasonal torch to autumn comes in late July and early August. It is with the garden sounds of Black crickets (Gryllus assimilis) and the dropping, crashing sound of any variety of half-ripened oak tree acorns. Click, cleek, click, and kerplunk, bop, crash! It is a signal so loud, a reminder that the full swing of autumn will be here in the blink of an eye. The fast approach of the autumnal equinox and the feast of St. Michael is near, and another growing season is about to fade.
Crickets begin their chirping near the end of July – and as September rolls around the mating call of the male cricket reaches a fevered pitch. With unusually hotter temperatures - is it global warming? - like the early birds in spring, this year they came weeks earlier than expected. Crickets have been used by some, farmers without thermometers perhaps, to calculate air temperatures. A simple mathematical formula can be used to determine approximate air temperatures. If you can count their chirps - count the number of chirps in 15 seconds and then add 37, then the sum will approximate the outside temperature in Fahrenheit degrees.
A female cricket lays approximately 300 eggs in late summer into fall. Crickets’ eggs overwinter in the soil where females lay them, like plant bulbs, rhizomes, seeds and tubers, to hatch in following growing season. Crickets feed on and breakdown organic plant material, and are a food source for other animals. They serve a useful natural purpose.
The acorn, the nut of the oak tree, develops slowly over the growing season. It ripens from a light green, and eventually turns into a nutmeg brown after its fall from the tree bough. Squirrels routinely scramble from tree to tree, and branch to branch, shaking oak nuts, and delivering what sounds like a torrential downpour of acorns. In areas where there are large oak groves, acorns provide an important link in the food chain for birds such as blue jays, pigeons, some ducks and several species of woodpeckers – as well for mammals such as mice and squirrels.
The ancient cultures also marked the calendar according to seasonal change and moon phases– and believed that a period of darkness must precede daylight, just as seeds begin new life in dark earth before bursting up towards increasing spring sunlight. So, the pagan year began at autumn – with festivals at sunset of summer. Our culture borrows this tradition, in a way. And, we may identify this time of year as the beginning of sunset in our agricultural year. At least, I know I do. And so, it has begun. I hear the sounds of approaching autumn –the approach of the harvest season where crickets begin their songs and the acorns their earthly drop - to the cycles of renewals.