Welcome to “Dear Daybreak”, a weekly Daybreak column. It features short vignettes about life in the Upper Valley: an encounter, some wry exchange with a stranger or acquaintance… Anything that happened in this region or relates to it and strikes a contributor as interesting or funny or poignant—or that makes us appreciate living here.

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Dear Daybreak:

“A peculiarity of these days is the first hearing of the crickets' creak, suggesting philosophy and thought. No greater event transpires now. It is the most interesting piece of news to be communicated, yet it is not in any newspaper.” (Thoreau)

I’m writing this at the golf course, at dusk. It was the last day of classes for the ‘25s. For everyone else, it was just another Wednesday. It’s sticky-hot, and the smoke from the wildfires in Canada has filtered the sunlight into a soft, headachey sepia.

Ava brought home two wine bottles from work. They were leftover after the cord celebration for the Social Impact seniors. She’s tipsy. I’m exhausted. We watch kids picnic in the grass. Their voices refract up the side of the hill and we hear their laughter as an echo.

Beneath that sound, the crickets. They compete with the frogs; they all seem delirious.

It’s that shoving-off season, again—suitcases pulled out from closets, parents buzzing. My job at the library ends in twenty-six days, and today I signed a W-2 for a new gig scooping ice cream on Main Street. I will make minimum wage and my summer will smell like sugar and cream. I hope to have no thoughts all July. But I’ll remember to wear my sunscreen (I’m becoming more and more like my mother). Soon it’ll be mid-August and every conversation will start with, “That went by fast!” Soon it’ll rain, and the sky will sweat with mosquitos.

Where’s your mind? Over there? That way, down the hill? Halfway into next week, two months in the future, a year down the line? Girl, mine, too. Vermont is green again, and eventually it will return to its precipitous yellows and oranges, although I won’t be here to see it. Change is New England’s quietest, truest lesson. It’s great to be young and collecting places to miss and mourn.

But for now, I’ll blow a dandelion. Who says the six-year-olds should have all the fun? I’m listening to the crickets.

In May, 1854, after hearing the summer’s first cricket, Henry David Thoreau wrote that the sound suggested “lateness.”

“The year is full of warnings of its shortness, as is life,” he mused.

Thoreau called the cricketsounds a “wisdom mature.” They’re perfectly on time. You’re the one who’s hurried and worried.

“Only in their saner moments do men hear the crickets,” he wrote. Only when heads are squarely above feet.

In a few weeks, Ava and I will be scooping ice cream and reading unchallenging novels. Then we’ll pack a car and navigate cross country, back to a place that was once our home and will be our home again. There are few cricketsounds in the Bay. But there’s the freeway and the train and sometimes the moan of cargo ships. And there’s always the radio, and my dad asking if I’d like a fried egg.

But for now, the crickets. “In their song they ignore our accidents,” wrote Thoreau. “A [choir] has begun which pauses not for any news, for it knows only the eternal.”

It’s good to be frenzied and heavy from the river, the humidity. I’m trying to hurry up and make my accidents. But then I’ll sit for a second, be still. I’ll shut up and try to hear the crickets.

— Kira Parrish-Penny, Hanover

Dear Daybreak: