Lifescapes

Wild Rose

I've been fascinated by Rose Wilder Lane, the only child of Laura and Almanzo Wilder, since I read her introduction and afterword to the little book, On the Way Home, Laura's diary of the family's trek from South Dakota to Mansfield MO in 1894. My interest was sharpened in 1993 when I read William Holtz's excellent biography, Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane.

Since then, I've been collecting books about RWL and her unpublished diaries, journals, letters, papers, and manuscripts, with the idea of someday writing a novel about her.That someday is now. This month, I expect to finish a draft, under the working title of Wild Rose. Here are some highlights of the life of this fascinating woman.

Rose Wilder was born on December 5, 1888, on her parents' homestead claim in what was then Dakota Territory. She was named for the wild roses that grew on the prairies. Her parents lost the claim to the drought, prairie fire, and the bank, and her father was crippled by the effects of diptheria. The family traveled briefly to Minnesota, to Florida, back to De Smet, SD, and then (1894) to Mansfield MO, where they bought a 40-acre farm. It wasn't productive enough to support the family, so they moved to Mansfield for about 10 years. Almanzo Wilder hauled goods for the railroad with his team and wagon and Laura Wilder ran a boarding table, cooking and serving meals to paying diners.

Rose was very bright. She hated school, skipped it often, and educated herself by reading—borrowed books like Quo Vadis and The Conquest of Peru, as well as Dickens, Austen, and Alcott, among others. She invented her own private language, Fiskoopo, and spoke it with her donkey, Spookendyke. Her last school year was spent with her aunt, Eliza Jane Wilder Thayer, in Crowley, LA, where she mastered high school subjects and graduated at the top of her Latin class.

Rose was a career woman before most people knew what that term meant. She began her professional life as a telegrapher for Western Union in Kansas City (1904), then became a reporter for the KC Star and Post (1910-1911). As one of the first women real estate agents in California, she sold land for small farms (1913-14). Then she became a full-time reporter and feature writer for the San Francisco Bulletin (1915-18).

Rose was married in 1909 to Gillette Lane, a newspaper reporter, promoter, and real estate agent. They had one child, a boy, who died (a stillbirth or early death). The marriage ended in 1915, and Rose moved to what she called "The Little House on Telegraph Hill," where she lived with her friend Berta Hoerner. The Lanes were divorced in 1918.

From 1917-1920, Rose produced not only newspaper stories but books: Charlie Chaplin, Art Smith (a daredevil pilot), Henry Ford, Jack London, and Herbert Hoover. She ghost-wrote Frederick O'Brien'sWhite Shadows in the South Seas. She also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Diverging Roads, which was serialized in Sunset Magazine and published as a book.

From 1920-1923, Rose traveled abroad for the American Red Cross, writing about the horrible aftermath of the Great War for readers back in the U.S. Her travels took her across Europe into the Middle East, the Balkans, and the Soviet Union. Her best-known book from that period is The Peaks of Shala, about her travels in Albania. Her short story, "Innocence," won an O.Henry award in 1922.

From 1925-1927, Rose lived with her friend, Helen Boylston (who would begin the Sue Barton, Nurse series in 1936) in Tirana, Albania. During that time, Rose wrote short fiction for American magazines. Her serial, "Cindy: A Romance of the Ozarks," was bought by Country Gentleman for $10,000, making her one of the best-paid magazine writers of the decade.

From 1928-1935, Rose lived at Rocky Ridge, her parents' Ozark farm. She built a retirement home there for her parents (the Rock House), and remodeled the farmhouse for herself and Boylston, who lived with her through late 1931. The stock market crash in 1928 wiped out the Lane, Wilder, and Boylston investments and dried up the magazine market. As the Depression wore on, Rose continued to write and sell magazine fiction, but at a slower rate and for less money. She ghost-wrote at least five adventure books for Lowell Thomas, and coauthored, with her mother, the first three books in the Little House series. In 1932, she wrote Let the Hurricane Roar, a very popular short novel that was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post and published as a book in 1933.

In 1935, Rose left the farm and moved to Columbia MO to do research for a book about the state of Missouri. While she was living in Columbia, she wrote "Credo," a treatise on individualism for the Post. Writing from a strong anti-New Deal stance (clarified during a trip she took with New Deal critic Garet Garrett), she based her political philosophy on the principles of personal responsibility, limited government, minimal taxes, and no entitlements. The essay was immediately popular and widely distributed in booklet form.

In 1935-36, Rose began work on Free Land (her second important novel), co-authored the fourth book of the Little House series with her mother, and wrote magazine fiction. In 1937, she moved to New York City, where she completed Free Land (serialized in the Post in 1937 and published as a best-selling book). She used part of her earnings to buy a little house on King Street in Danbury, CT, her primary residence for the rest of her life.

From 1937-1943, Rose co-authored, with her mother, the three remaining books of the Little House series. After Free Land, she published no more fiction. Instead, she concentrated on her political writings, publishing her book,The Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle against Authority in 1943 and beginning a series of articles ("Rose Lane Says") for the Pittsburgh Courier. Her isolationist, anti-war, anti-Roosevelt stance was not popular at the time, but The Discovery of Freedom has become increasingly influential, especially with conservatives. She is recognized as among the first to use the term "libertarian" to describe her political philosophy, and is often paired with Ayn Rand and Isabel Patterson as the three "mothers" of the Libertarian Party. Her "adopted grandson," Roger MacBride, was the Libertarian candidate for president in 1976.

Throughout her life, Rose was an ardent letter writer. Her 40-year correspondence with Dorothy Thompson was published by William Holtz in 1991 (Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane: Forty Years of Friendship). Her correspondence with Jasper Crane was published by Roger MacBride in 1973 (The Lady and the Tycoon).

Rose was an accomplished needlewoman. In the 1940s, she wrote a series of articles on American needle arts for Woman's Day, and a second series in the early 1960s. In 1964, these were published as a book, The Woman's Day Book of American Needlework, blending Rose's interest in women's fiber arts and political history. In 1965, the magazine dispatched her to Viet Nam. At 78, she was the oldest war correspondent to cover that conflict.

Rose died in her sleep on October 20, 1968 at the age of 82. She was preparing to leave on a trip to Europe and beyond. On her plain granite stone are engraved these words from Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason: An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot. Neither the Channel nor the Rhine will arrest its prgress. It will march on the horizon of the world and it will conquer.

Note: This is the first in a series of posts about this project. Look for more in weeks to come.

Corrections/updates: Special thanks to Nansie Cleveland for corrections regarding grasshoppers in South Dakota and the dates of RWL's needlework articles.

Writer At Work

Several readers have asked me, recently, to post something about my writing process--so here it is, for what it's worth.

As you can see from the photo, I'm a very messy writer. I wish I could be tidier, but I can't: I simply work best when I'm surrounded by resource materials, in stacks on the desk, on the floor, in my computer browser. (These days, more and more of my resource materials are online--true for everyone, I suspect.) When I finish a project and turn in a manuscript (an e-file, sent via email to the editor), I try to clean my office, reshelve the books, refile the papers, and get ready for the next project. And yes, that's Molly Maguire's butt under the desk. She spends the day there. Toro prefers to sleep in the hallway, where we can stumble over him more easily.

Currently, I'm working on a novel about Rose Wilder Lane, set between 1928-1939, when she was living in Missouri and working with her mother (Laura Ingalls Wilder) on the Little House books. I've been compiling background materials since 1991, when I visited the Herbert Hoover Library and copied Rose's journals and diaries for those years. (I have several of these long-held novel ideas--hoping to get to them over the next few years, before somebody else does!) RWL's diary is the primary source for the novel; as I've encountered secondary sources, I've added them to my collection. I'm plagued with the thought that I'll never know enough to start writing, but I have to make a start, so I have.

When I'm writing, I like to write every day: if I go away from the work, I forget what I was doing and have to do too much backtracking. I go to work as early as I can, after the morning chores (walking/feeding dogs, managing chickens, garden upkeep, laundry, life) and breakfast. I'm on the job usually by 10 a.m. I start with the new material from the day before, revising, adding, subtracting, multiplying. Then a lunch break (these days, I also take chicken breaks, to check on the health and welfare of the new flock).

Back to work after a quick lunch, usually producing new material until 4:30 on the dot, when the dogs come to tell me that they'll starve if I don't stop and do something about their supper. (I suspect them of carrying watches in their pockets, so they can inform me of the time.) And then of course, our supper, which is usually a one-dish skillet meal with a side or two. In the evenings, I read project-related material.

When I'm writing mysteries, I usually calendar 90 days for a book, planning to complete the book in about 70-75 days, depending on its complexity. (The "extra" days are for those necessities of life: shopping, doctor, dentist, short trips, etc.) I set a goal of about 1500 words a day. With the RWL novel, my word goal is 1000 words: it's much more complex and multi-layered; I'm working with many primary/secondary sources; and I have the sense that I'm writing for several different audiences, some of whom will be highly critical. I usually work straight through until I have about 50,000 words. Then I go back to the beginning, reading and redrafting the lot--and "coast" on that energy into the second half (roughly) of the book. At about 75,000 words, I go back to the beginning and redraft again, then "coast" through the end of the book.

Update, 1:45 Sunday: I just remembered something I wanted to add. I keep a simple log of my daily work, so that I have a record of what I've done on each project. This is just a little spiral memo notebook. Starting with #1, I number the days down the left side. I add the date (10.21) and the day Sunday and my total word count: 80,600. Tomorrow, it will be 10.22, Monday, 81,600--that's the plan, anyway. If I go to the library tomorrow (I have microfilm to work with there), I probably won't make that goal, so I'll jot down a note: Library 1-4, or whatever. I have a log for every book I've ever written. It helps me know where I am, where I've been, where I'm going--and when I'm likely to get there. Invaluable. 

Questions? I'll try to answer them in the comments.

Reading note. And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.~Sylvia Plath

Pecan Harvest!

It's pecan harvest time here at Meadow Knoll, and Bill has been busy--working hard to keep ahead of the squirrels. The trays in this photo contain nuts gathered from a single tree, and we have 20 bearing trees. They don't all produce as well as this one, but all together, it's a good year for pecans.

Bill grafted these trees, on native stock planted here and there by squirrels, floods, and other random acts of a kind and generous nature. He chose the natives for their sturdiness and location, and grafted them with scions (graftwood cut from the previous season's growth of a productive tree) of different cultivars: Choctaw, Desirable, Kiowa, Dobie. They usually bear in alternate years, but the drought confused them and they're out of sync.

Still, this year is a good year and there are plenty of nuts. Bill gathers them; we settle in front of the TV for a shucking party; and then he takes the nuts to a guy in Bertram who cracks/shells them for us. We store them in the freezer--they keep well until the next crop.

All of which means plenty of pecan pies, naturally, like this one I baked yesterday.



Bill's Absolute All-Time Favorite Pecan Pie

1 cup dark corn syrup (if you use light, use brown sugar)

3 eggs

1 cup sugar (brown sugar, if you have light corn syrup)

4 tablespoons butter, melted

3 tablespoons bourbon (rum, if you'd rather)

1-1/2 cups chopped pecans

1 (9-inch) unbaked pie shell

Mix ingredients in order listed. Pour into pie shell. Bake 10 minutes at 425 degrees, 40 minutes at 325. We like this warm, with ice cream.

Reading note, from Calvin Trillin, American Fried (a collection of his newspaper columns from the 1970s):

When it came to poetry, my father was not an absolutist. Pie was his favorite subject for a couplet, but every three or four weeks he would write about something else—perhaps a couplet like

"'Eat your food,' gently said Mom to little son Roddy.
'If you don't, I will break every bone in your body.'"

The next day he would be back to pies --

"Mrs. Trillin's pecan pie, so nutritious and delicious
Will make a wild man mild and a mild man vicious."

Works-in-progress: October

The broiler chicks (Cornish Rock X) are growing fast, eating like there's no tomorrow. I just opened the second 50# sack of chick starter. The nights here are beginning to cool off, so I turn on the heat lamp about 10 p.m. and turn it off at 7 a.m. Next week, they'll be big enough to keep themselves warm unless the temp drops below 55. I'll let them out of the coop next week, weather permitting, and into their fenced chicken yard.

The layer chicks (Red Stars and Buff Orpingtons--7 of them) are still in the house, in their bathtub brooder (yes, we do have two bathtubs--one for them, one for us). They grow more slowly--will probably go out to the coop in another 10 days or so, and move in with the broilers. I don't think there'll be a problem integrating them: the Cornish are pretty laid back, as long as there's food available.

 

Needlepoint project: This is "Amber Waves," designed by Laura Perin. (Apologies for the photo: I'm still learning this new camera and not liking it very much.) I started this needlepoint sometime late in August. I usually work on it in the evenings for a couple of hours--not making very fast progress, but that's not the point, is it? I do want to finish this one, though: have a new one waiting and am eager to get started on it.

Book report. The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose is out this month (strong reviews!). I visited Dani Greer's blog, The Blood Red Pencil, blogging about some of the historical background in the book.

Also out this month: the final book in the Cottage Tales: The Tale of Castle Cottage. I posted a page of historical recipes from the book, for those of you who have read your library's copy. All the recipes from all the books are up now--just click on the book cover and you'll go to the page. The link to the printable pdf is at the top.

Writing work currently in progress: Wild Rose (that's the working title: it may change). I'll be focussed on this through Christmas, when I need to start the next China Bayles mystery. I'd like to have a full draft by that time--hoping so, anyway. This is a novel about Rose Wilder Lane (1866-1968), for those of you who have tuned in late. RWL was an enormously complicated woman, and the challenge (in addition to the difficult work of fictionalizing a real person) is doing justice to her rich contradictions and complications. As a basic background text of RWL's life, I'm using William Holtz's splendid biography, The Ghost in the Little House, as well as the collection of articles and books I've put together over the 20+ years of my interest in this topic. For the primary source material, I'm using RWL's diaries and journals for the years 1928-1939, the period covered by the central story of the novel. I'm deeply indebted to the archivists at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library for their help in assembling the primary material. I'm also indebted to Nansie Cleveland for her excellent bibliography of the writings of RWL and her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder. I'll have more about this later, after I've finished the draft. I'm pretty obsessive about the writing just now.

Garden report. Tomatoes blooming, Kentucky Wonder beans climbing the trellis, spinach planted for early spring harvest. I'll be digging sweet potatoes later this month.

Reading note. Somebody commented on Confederate Rose that it was "easy reading." I'm complimented, but it made me think of this: Easy reading is damn hard writing.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Baby Chicks: New Arrivals

 

Here they are, this year's chicken flock, just as they arrived in the mail this week, safe in their cardboard box from McMurray Hatchery. We've gotten our chicks there for years and have never been disappointed. In this batch: 30 Cornish Rock X, meat birds; 5 Red Stars, laying birds; and 1 "extra" (replacement, in case of an early death).

 

The little flock is now safely settled in its bathtub brooder, in our guest bathroom. (Guests, please keep the door shut. The dogs and cat would love to investigate.) I lined the tub with plastic, put down dried grass hay for litter, then (for the first day or two) a layer of newspaper. A couple of 100-watt bulbs keep them warm. The bathroom is next to my writing studio, so it's easy to keep an eye on them. They'll outgrow the tub in a couple of weeks and then go outdoors, to the chicken coop and yard, which is fenced against predators (skunks, raccoons, hawks, snakes).

I'm not crazy about raising the Cornish because they have leg problems if you don't butcher about 9-10 weeks. But the meat is wonderful and they're fairly economical. The Red Stars are great brown egg producers and start early, about 5 months (hoping that we'll have eggs by February!). Starting another laying flock was a big decision: it means that one of us has to be home to feed. We'll see how that goes.

 

Book Report. The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose is out, to great reviews. Publishers Weekly calls it a "superior cozy"--high praise, from that publication. I'm working on Wild Rose (a novel about Rose Wilder Lane, the writer behind the Little House books)--about halfway through a draft and enjoying the writing process very much. As you might guess, the project involves an extraordinary amount of research: transforming a real person into a fictional character is very different from creating a fictional person out of your imagination. And this particular real person presents some large challenges, so the process is even more interesting. I look forward every morning to sitting down to work--a huge blessing, and I'm hugely grateful.

 

Garden Report. Some rain this week (amazing!) so the garden is looking especially good. The potatoes are coming up, the tomatoes look good, there's a new planting of okra to look forward to, and beans have mostly survived the cutworm stage. Hoping for a productive fall garden and a late first frost, but of course you never know.

 

Reading note . If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood.  I'd type a little faster.~Isaac Asimov

In Bloom This Week: Garlic Chives

It's Garlic Chives Week in my garden. These enthusiastic self-sowers have popped up all over, but you won't hear me complain. Their flat, oniony-garlicky leaves have a heftier taste than ordinary chives, and the dark green adds a bright bit of color. They're great with scrambled eggs, in dips for chips, as an ingredient in herb butters, and soups. Asian cooks use them in stir-fries; they go especially well with prawns and scallops. I like to mix a spoonful of chopped garlic chives with feta cheese and some olive oil, spread on crusty bread slices, and pop under the broiler. When I'm feeling lazy, they're a reasonable (but less pungent) substitute for fresh garlic. And their plentiful black seeds, saved and sprouted, are a nice mid-winter salad treat.

For me, one of the best things about garlic chives is the fact that they bloom at the tail end of summer, when the garden looks brown and tired. Their sprightly white blossoms have a delicate beauty. I use them as a border along the path and allow them to come up wherever they please in the garden beds. The bees adore them: the pure white flowers are a late-summer treat for them, too.

And yes, these pretties are good for you, too. They belong (like garlic) to the Allium family, and are used medicinally as a milder form of garlic. In China, where this herb is a regular on the medicine shelf, it's used as a vermifuge, an astringent, as a treatment for bug bites, and to help reduce fatigue. I'll go for that, actually. Just looking at these lovely white blossoms is enough to perk me up.

On another subject: Several weeks ago, our neighbor set a hog trap on his side of our fence, on his posted property. The guy lives in Austin, so he's not around to check it. This morning, there was a doe in the trap. The game warden drove out and released her. She was slightly injured: bloody nose and haunches. The game warden says he's been called several times to release deer from unmonitored hog traps. If I had my way, there'd be a special place in hell for people who set traps and fail to keep an eye on them--as bad as careless hunters who wound game and don't bother to track/kill.

Reading Note, from Rachel Carson: One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, "What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?"

Guest Blogging: Blood-Red Pencil

 

I'm guest-blogging at Dani Greer's Blood-Red Pencil. "The Past Holds Many Secrets." Drop in, leave me a note. 

Works In Progress: September 2012

My in-progress needlepoint project is called "Amber Waves." Lots of different stitches--and I'm learning to manipulate the stitches, where I wasn't quite exact with the dividing lines. Love these colors. And this is such relaxing work after a long day at the computer, out in the garden, doing housework. I love sitting down (actually bought myself a new chair this week--fits me perfectly) and picking up a piece of needlework.

Here's the project I told you about in the August WIP report--all finished, framed in a simple black frame. This will hang in our log cabin in New Mexico. Both this one and "Amber Waves" are about 10" X 10". Both are designed by Laura Perin. 

 Book report. I've been working steadily and making good forward progress on Wild Rose, the working title of the Rose Wilder Lane novel. I'm nearly half-way through the book, I think, although I still have some major decisions to make about what to include, what to leave out.

I also have an idea for a series of website posts that will provide some of the historical, factual framework for Wild Rose--something like an online series of expanded fully-documented footnotes that I can later (perhaps) collect into an eBook supplement to the novel. Rose has been so often mischaracterized in print and online by people who have an agenda, sometimes literary, sometimes political: I want to clarify some of these issues, set the record straight on others.

Garden. The fall garden is partly in. I planted Irish potatoes two weeks ago (I saved the seed potatoes from my spring crop) and Kentucky pole beans last week. I planted tomatoes (more Porters) in early August; they'll be ready to go in the ground next weekend, when it's supposed to be cooler. Ditto the sweet bell peppers. Mid-month, I'll plant spinach. Meanwhile, we are eating lots of okra. Eating locally means eating in season, you know.

Reading in progress. I'm reading quite a lot of research material for Wild Rose, as you can imagine. I'll post the full bibliography on the website at some point. Otherwise, I'm reading Willa Cather right now, O Pioneers! (just because I hadn't read it in a while). Just finished The Midwife of Hope River, by Patricia Harman, and will be writing a big-thumbs-up review this week. I'm listening to (on my MP3 player, while I walk the dogs, work in the garden) The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, by Jonathan Alter--also period research. That's just a sample: lots more on the stack!

Books and travels. Next Saturday, it's Murder by the Book in Houston, to celebrate the launch of The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose. I'll be talking about the research I did for the book--for this one, it was an interesting series of accidental discoveries that led to still other accidental discoveries. When the book was finished, I was amazed at all the fascinating things I discovered in the writing process. Join me at Murder By the Book if you can.

Reading note. If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.  ~Toni Morrison

Penelope: Writing Spider at Work

Every year, here at Meadow Knoll, in the area between the fence and the photinia bush, a writing spider (a golden silk orb spider) sets up shop and begins to spin. I can't prove it, but since the webs are always in the same place, I suspect that the spider is the daughter of the spider who lived and spun her web in that place the year before. I love looking at her, watching her spin. I particularly like the ZZZ zigzags in the middle of her web, which are designed (so say spider researchers) to stabilize the thing so it doesn't tear to pieces when a large and unruly meal lands in the middle of it. It's those zigzag filaments that have given her the name of "writing spider."

I have a different name for this spider. I call her Penelope, in honor of the wife of Odysseus, who--to deflect ambitious suitors--spins (and unravels) a shroud for her absent husband, promising to remarry only when she's finished her weaving. A master spinner, deft and quick, my Penelope has woven a web of an impressive size: some three feet by three feet. (And yes, this is definitely girl power: only the females spin webs.) Her web is designed to catch flying insects (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) and constructed at an angle. I've read that to make it, Penelope has spun a non-sticky thread into the breeze: when the end snags on a branch or leaf, she walks carefully along it, spinning another but stronger non-sticky thread, then--at an angle--another, until she's constructed a large frame, within which she goes to work, weaving. As a weaver, Penelope is good. She is very, very good.

In fact, the spider silk the golden orb spins has become a prized item. Recently, the Museum of Natural History in New York City put on display a rare piece of silk weaving, produced by these spiders--with a little help from humans, of course. 

Source: wired.com via Susan on Pinterest

According to an article in Wired Science, "To produce this unique golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar [the golden orb spiders there are known for the rich golden color of their silk], while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today." The extraction process didn't injure the spiders, who were released back into the wild. (Imagine the stories they told their spider friends when they got home!)

I'm a spinner and I know how much work it takes to produce yarn from wool.

I can barely imagine the amount of work Penelope has put into her web, and I simply cannot imagine the task of spinning a gold cloth from the silk of a million wild Penelopes. Sounds like a fairy tale to me.

Maybe my next mystery will feature a writing spider.

Reading note:  Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.--Khaled Hosseini 

 

Cicadas: The Sound of Summer

Photo copyright 2012 Peggy Fountain Moody

Summer has many sounds here in the Texas Hill Country. Occasionally, during the day, I hear the throaty, strumming call of the secretive yellow-billed cuckoo--my mother called it a rain crow and believed that it signaled rain (I wish oh I wish). At night, there's the plaintive quank quank of the tree frogs. And all through the long afternoons, through the hottest hours of the day, the incessant, metalic buzzing of the cicadas.

A researcher at the University of Texas--someone with very good ears--identified five species of Cicadidae at a field laboratory some 50 miles east of us. Another researcher, in 1933, wrote this memorable report from an area 100 miles to our east:

"East central Texas is a veritable cicada paradise. I have never visited a region where so many species are as abundant as occur in, for instance, the Madison County region. They are numerous in many parts of the post oak woods, but are most plentiful in the alluvial forests and groves in the lower grounds along the Navasota and Trinity Rivers. Here in June and July, the air is vibrant with the songs of Tibicen superba, T. pruinosa, T. resh, T. marginalis, T. chloromera, T. lyricen and Diceroprocta vitripennis. The chorus becomes most intense late in the afternoon, when pruinosa may predominate. The songs of the species mentioned differ considerably and are quite easily recognizable. Tibicen resh is often found in great numbers in some large detached oak or other tree standing in the open, the trunk of which may bear scores of the cast skins of this species. Resh may be silent for long intervals, when suddenly the whole population may burst into song simultaneously, resulting in an ear-splitting din which subsides as suddenly as it arose.

I can't claim to make these fine distinctions of cicada song, but I know one when I hear it. I recognize the round, thumb-sized holes from which the nymphs emerge after their long, secret life underground--three years for some species, seventeen years for others. (Think what has happened in the past seventeen years and then imagine sleeping through it!)

And I can see their empty exoskeletons clinging to twigs and tree trunks, where the nymphs have hung themselves out to dry for a few hours after their emergence, then abandoned their shells for wings and the wide world--and sex. The male sings for his mate and dies. The mated female lays her eggs on a tree branch and dies. And the eggs hatch into nymphs, drop to the ground, and burrow deep, a foot or more, to sleep through dark, silent, songless summers.

Photo from Wikipedia, Creative Commons

And then to emerge, and sing all the summer afternoon.

Reading note: In summer, the song sings itself.  ~William Carlos Williams