Carried away

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I step out my front door to cross the lawn and the strip of asphalt that is between me and my mailbox. The sound of cicadas in the nearby trees suddenly takes me back more than fifty years. My grandparents had 160 acres in southeast Oklahoma. They were at least twelve miles from the nearest town, and over a mile from their mailbox, or any neighbors. I often spent a week or so there in the summer, usually around my birthday in August. With any luck my cousin from Texas would be there as well. The phone was a party line. The television was black and white and picked up perhaps one channel. All the entertainment was outside. On lazy hot summer afternoons you could hear the cicadas whirring. There were grasshoppers big enough to look like small birds. The hens would be out scratching around. They enjoyed the plenty of the bugs, along with an occasional mouse or snake for a snack. You could hear them softly muttering. I would walk down the sandy driveway and back, seeing the slither marks of baby snakes. The Indian paintbrush and purple larkspur graced the sides of the road, along with sensitive plant and nettles. If I ventured through the gate to the gravel road there was deep shade of trees making a canopy. In the pastures there was a horse or two and plenty of Hereford cattle destined for market. Yellow bitterweed was part of their fodder. With nothing left to do, we would put a pallet out on an old sheet of linoleum on the grass. We could look up at clouds that brought no rain but looked like piles of whipped cream in a cool blue sky. At night we were surrounded by stars. Moths pollinated the blooms in the garden. It is amazing how far you can travel on the wings of a locust, what southern girls call a cicada.