Crickets

The doldrums are upon us. After 40 days and nights of rain Austin is settling into the slow rhythm that gets us through the long, hot Texas summer. The rivers and lakes are receding back into their shores, but a sudden violent downpour floods the roads, running off the water-logged ground.

The crickets have taken up their summer residence in the cool corners of the sanctuary and only seem to come out during services to serenade the choir or crawl up the back of old ladies' legs. I like the crickets and like to imagine have tiny little homes in the pipe organs where they practice their music all day. Father Cricket wears a mossy green cardigan, threadbare at the elbows, which Mother Cricket fashioned from a bit of woolen sock that had been torn on a nail and given to the women's sewing circle to be mended before joining the great tumble of clothes lying in resigned disrepute under a carefully hand-lettered sign reading:

Donations Here
(God Bless)

Let's hear what Keats has to say.

On the grasshopper and cricket

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the grasshopper's - he takes the lead
In summer luxury, - he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one, in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.