by Beth Dolinar, contributing writer
The electric bill for June was bad—bad enough to cause me to turn off the air conditioning. Many of us have been sweating through the hottest summer on record. Just keeping the AC at a mild (but not chilly) 73 degrees caused my kilowatts to pile up.
And so, I decided to do something very retro, something that would bring a bit of the summer night back into my world and save me some money. I opened my windows.
If you have air conditioning, you live with the gentle, metallic humming of the machine. And if you don’t have that, you live with the sounds of the summer night. They were the sounds that filled the air outside our little house when I was growing up.
The heat drifted up to my bedroom on the second floor, making my sisters and me sweaty and restless. And then, with bedcovers tossed off and pillows flipped to the cool side, we rolled onto our backs and listened. The nighttime world outside our home woke up, and lulled us to sleep.
At first, there was the sound of a radio and a play-by-play announcer calling the balls and strikes of a baseball game; our dad would sit on our square little front stoop and listen to the game, sipping from a glass of beer. I’d still be awake when the last out was called in the last inning, and I’d hear my dad open the screen door and then lock the other door behind him and walk up the stairs.
When the human sounds of the radio ended, the nature sounds would come into focus. First, the crickets, a choir that sounded like there were thousands out there in the woods. Years later I would learn that just a few crickets can sound like many, the scratching of their hind legs combining to build a high-pitched hum that was steady and uninterrupted.
An owl lived in the woods at the bottom of our large back yard, and I’d hear the lonely, mournful hoot. Sometimes a different bird would answer with a squawk or a caw. I imagined the owl with its enormous wingspan swooping down to grab a chipmunk, or maybe a cricket.
Sometimes there’d come a scraping sound against the window, the work of a breeze moving the branches of a tree. The wind rustling all the trees back there in the woods—that’s what swirling sounded like. Our mother’s wind chimes hanging by the side porch twinkled in the breeze.
Lying there, I could picture all of it. The things you can hear but can’t see make themselves vivid in the imagination. I pictured a parade of crickets, dancing trees, wise owls. And my sleepy father sitting out there on the porch.
I live in a place that’s different from my childhood home, a busier place closer to the city. Through open windows I can hear a car passing on the street, can hear the muffled conversations of neighbors on their back patio, the bark of a dog. But there are crickets, too, in the vast green valley behind me.
Without the AC on, it’s hot. I’m tempted to turn it back on, no matter what it costs, so I can fall asleep. I get up to close the windows and hear the crickets, the caw of a bird, the laughter of my neighbors.
Summer is out there. I can picture it all.
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About the author: Beth Dolinar is a writer, Emmy-award winning producer, and public speaker. She writes a popular column for the Washington “Observer-Reporter.” She is a contributing producer of documentary length programming for WQED-TV on a wide range of topics. Beth has a son and a daughter. She is an avid yoga devotee, cyclist and reader. Beth says she types like lightning but reads slowly — because she likes a really good sentence.
