It is odd how we always think of crickets as a summer insect, but they really aren’t. Or more accurately, summer is a complicated set of seasons and not one season at all. Crickets belong to late in August, to the lengthening nights, the tall and drying grasses, and the leaves that are no longer the luscious green summer leaves but have become whip thin and rustle in the stirring breeze.  Sometimes, there is the drenching summer humidity; but nearly as often are the days with temperature changes of twenty or thirty degrees.  This is cricket weather, they don’t belong in the velvet darkness of June or even July, when the fireflies are at their peak and all is green and growing. They are an odd echo of the spring peepers, but somehow a steadier sound. The peepers are frantic and (naturally) very directional, since they always come from one location: a suitable pond. If the peepers are a sudden wellspring of life, the crickets are the steady, encompassing beat of life fulfilled.