It seemed that the earth and sky had forgotten their seasonal appointment when throughout January and February, into March, it was still cold and rainy; there was even... a little flooding as if it were winter! The late spring had not yet seen the sun, the rows of Lagerstroemia trees with bare branches were still sleeping soundly, occasionally the north wind could be heard rustling, and there was absolutely no sign of the summer shade anywhere...
However, April has arrived. The April luggage is bustling with a sound that no one can mistake because it is extremely summer! Well, the sun is not yet golden, the sky is not yet clear - maybe but hearing the cicadas chirping, it is 100% certain that summer has come. Fierce, deep, resonant, passionate, the scheduled sound has never been more urgent, more seething, affirming the footsteps of summer like this year! At five o'clock in the morning, everyone is awake. At ten o'clock, it reaches its peak.
After a few hours of break at noon, it was time for the afternoon session. From single notes to harmonious notes, high notes and low notes resounded! Cicadas swung on green treetops. Cicadas perched on roofs and walls. Cicadas crawled through windows into houses. Gray cicadas, looking like giant flies or bees... with thin wings and big round eyes. Cicadas were close, gentle, and friendly, allowing naughty students to freely catch them and bring them into the classroom, lining them up on the desks, occasionally using their hands to lightly press on their backs to make the male cicadas "musicians" vibrate their wings and make "e.., e..." sounds for fun!
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| Illustration: Tra My |
I don't understand why those cicadas are called "cicadas". "What's sad, bustling and noisy, happy like... a festival!" My friend humorously said. Calmly thinking about it, it's not without reason: the cicadas' music makes noise, yes, but sadness... not necessarily! Thinking back, maybe the mood is like this: sad people make the sound of cicadas sad too. Summer, the season of farewells, away from friends and school, that's probably why they're sad. But anyway, that's a thing of the past. Now that summer has come, how many kids are on summer vacation? If they don't go to school, they'll go to... extra classes. Of course, the cicadas are happy to chirp loudly in a chorus announcing the arrival of summer, so no one is afraid of being sad. The bustling sound welcomes the most brilliant and splendid time of the year: golden sunshine, deep blue sky, strong southerly wind!
When I was a child, I only knew about cicadas through… books - even though I was a country kid who loved nature and was ready to tell in detail the “whereabouts” of butterflies, bees, dragonflies, grasshoppers, crickets, mole crickets, and rice crickets, but when it came to cicadas, I was… deaf! Not knowing, I had to imagine or “copy” other people’s ideas.
It's easy: the image of the cicada and the sound of the cicada have entered many music and poems - including world-famous poems such as the fable "The Cicada and the Ant" by the French poet La Fontaine! The "behavior" of the cicada as described by La Fontaine sounds quite "negative": lazy and unwilling to work, only interested in singing, leading to famine...
But strangely enough, after reading the poem, I still felt… more in love with the romantic, lazy cicada than the industrious, pragmatic, cold ant. Only later, when I grew up and approached science , understood the life cycle and habits of cicadas, did I realize: the “sentence” that La Fontaine received for catching cicadas in the fable was clearly… unjust! It turned out that my childish intuition was correct back then when I insisted on loving the poor cicada even though I didn’t know he was “wrongly accused”…
As if to thank the humanistic thoughts, the cicadas on the tree by the window suddenly sang a late afternoon song for me. One of them was so happy that he followed the light and flew through the door, landed on the table and fluttered his wings...
Source: https://baodaklak.vn/van-hoa-du-lich-van-hoc-nghe-thuat/202504/thanh-am-ha-b87063a/
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