Sitting on the porch and reading this time of the year is always an enjoyable pastime. This year the cicadas seem unusually plentiful and almost impossibly loud. I notice there are many more dragon flies this summer compared to previous summers as well. I am not sure why that is or if it has anything to do with our newly arrived Joro spiders. But listening to the July Flies, what the country folks call cicadas , I am reminded of my fraternal grandmother Dot. The stories I could tell about Dot!….
Anyway she told me years ago that the first day you heard the July flies buzzing was 90 days out from the first frost. At least that was the conventional wisdom for western North Carolina.
At the time I was an organic gardener tending to square foot plots of lots of different vegetables. I kept a pretty extensive garden log book each year. One cool morning prior to my commute to Atlanta to my programming job, I started the car up. What looked like fog on the windshield turned out to be a light frost. HEY! I remember noting the first July Fly buzzing in the garden log. So back in the house I went, got my log book out and counted the days on the calendar. It was exactly 90 days earlier. Dot had died the previous year. I went back and got in the car again and I had a little shiver that had nothing to do with the temperature.
That was the only year that it worked out to exactly 90 days. In fact other years were off by 2 or 3 weeks either way. But that one year…