Summer cicadas

I am listening to the cicadas sing their summer song and it reminds me of summers past, growing up in a house in the woods of Maryland. The trees were so tall and blocked the afternoon sun so you thought it was really later than it was.

Yesterday I found a cicada skin shed by the growing bug. I brought it in to show my son. I used to gather these in the summer plucking them off trees and hunting all over trying to get more than my sisters and brother. I had a small box that once held some piece of jewelry with some cotton in it that I would keep my cicada skins in.

We spent so much time outside playing in the woods. We would run down our steep driveway through the cul de sac and into the woods that took us down another long hill to the stream. We had our favorite areas. One spot had a dead tree that we could hide in. One opening of the tree was on the top side of the bank and the other lower where a spring came out. We would climb though and pretend it was a house, or a rocket. The earth was worn smooth from our bottoms scraping the dirt from the top of the bank to the stream bed.

Further downstream was a favorite place to catch crayfish. We would catch them and bring them home. Mom would make us take them back the next day telling us they would not survive in tap water. Looking back on this, I think she just wanted her Tupperware back in the cabinet where it belonged.

We would come home soaking wet from slipping on leaves and ending up in the stream. We would have snake swim through our arms as we careful held the Tupperware steady in the current patiently waiting for the crayfish to fall into our trap. We walked through small waterfalls. Practiced balancing of slippery rocks and hopped from rock to rock across the stream. We never ventured into the woods across the stream, to this day I don't remember what was on the other side but more woods. I never got poison ivy or got bitten by a poisonous snake. We would be away from home for hours. As the day ended we would trudge slowly up the hill home using small branches to pull ourselves up the steep hill. We always wondered if the hike home was worth going to ply in the stream. But the next day we would run happily down the hill and do it all over again.