Our Sense of Smell…Reminders Of A Time Gone By

It is springtime and cabin fever abounds.

I haven’t lived in four seasons in three decades. I’ve always lived in the Midwest and the East, which have traditional four seasons. In Southern California, we have two seasons – hot and cold – and somewhere in between. It is not uncommon to have a heat wave here in January or sudden cold in June. The locals here in Los Angeles call this phenomenon June Gloom.

Though I have been living in the desert Southwest for a long time, I have a longing for the sweet aroma of clover and honeysuckle in springtime which we don’t have here. When I was growing up in my native Maryland and Virginia, these were smells and sounds in the air that made me feel alive again. Yet, I can’t tell you what those smells and sounds were.

As I write this, it is chilly here on the Southern California high desert though there have been some warm days. Yet – I vividly remember the mid-Atlantic in spring when Mother Nature, which had been sleeping for months, was awakening and bursting with life. Trees were budding, grass was on the grow, crickets and tree frogs were beginning to sing, and lawnmowers in the neighborhood were beginning to sound. I remember how alive I felt as an adolescent in spring. We had been couped up all winter and house dust was getting the best of us kids. There was a huge sense of freedom and the great outdoors.

Have you ever noticed how dead the air sounds in winter? Because cold air is dense, it tends to muffle the ambient sounds around us. Traffic sounds distant in a dull roar. If children are outside at all, you can barely hear them playing. In that dead of winter, you don’t hear the sounds of nature – birds, tree frogs, crickets, and Blue Jays bullying other birds out of their nests.

Seems Mother Nature is in hibernation.

Summer yields its own array of unique sounds. As summer heat and humidity settle into the dog days of summer back in the Mid-Atlantic, the sounds of nature develop a familiarity. Whenever we began to hear “Katydids,” we knew the start of school was but a few weeks away. We also understood cold weather was just around the corner.

The Forest Preserve District of Will County in Joliet, Illinois tells us these crooning insects make themselves heard all across the area. It goes on to say these singing insects are cicadas, crickets, grasshoppers and Katydids in which the males produce loud calls in their search for a female mate – according to the University of Florida. These seasonal sounds may just be a loud “din” to most of us, however, each sound is unique to each species.

It may interest you to know Katydids, grasshoppers and crickets are all closely related according to the Forest Preserve District – belonging to the order Orthoptera, while cicadas belong to the order Homoptera. Who knew?

It goes on to say the Orthoptera insects — the Katydids, crickets and grasshoppers — typically produce sounds by rubbing one body part against another, which is known as “stridulation,” according to “Songs Of Insects.” Crickets rub structures on their wings together to produce their call per “The Singing Insects of the Chicago Region” by author Carl Strang. Male grasshoppers are able to produce sound by rubbing a hind leg against a forewing. Katydids make their traditional sound by rubbing their forewings together.

I did not know that… 

These folks versed on the subject go on to say, “Cicadas have sound organs called ‘tymbals,’ which have a series of ribs that can buckle onto one another when the cicada flexes its muscles. The buckling creates a clicking noise, and the combined effect of these clicks is the buzzing sound cicadas make.”

Even if you don’t know what you’re talking about, you might be able to tell the difference between some of these insect calls. Crickets, as one example, have more musical sounding calls because of their low frequency, according to the Forest Preserve District. Katydids and grasshoppers have a higher pitch call in varying frequencies.

When we settle into those first chilly days and the sweet aroma of woodsmoke and the sound of Trick or Treaters, one begins to wonder where the sounds and smell of summer went.