the death of summer

This summer I started noticing the crickets in the evenings, when it was hot out and they seemed so excited. Maybe I shouldn't ascribe emotion to them but that's what it always sounded like: they were excited for it to be summer. It was nevertheless a peaceful sort of sound. It may have been unpleasantly muggy but everything was more or less right with the world.

Of course, like all background noises I eventually stopped noticing them for some reason or another. Maybe I still heard them but they weren't there or maybe I simply stopped being in a position to notice them--the point is I didn't really notice them again until tonight, when I noticed them again, slower, almost mournful, like they were on the verge of not chirping at all. Like maybe they were mourning the death of summer, or perhaps the death of summer was nearly killing them off.

It's one of those things I've never really known anything about in any real sense. But I know there's a point where they stop, and there's something a little sad about that.