Lessons from the grasshopper that never were told

In the Midwest, we often see summer as a time "in between": The greening of corn as it rises between planting and harvesting, the short season of sun couched between spring and fall's cooler days, the days for romance until one returns to school.

"Summer is a promissory note signed in June," wrote Nebraskan-born outdoors writer Hal Borland, "its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January."

As a lush green covers the Johnson County's plains and we idle our nights away in the warmth, I suggest that summer also is a time of discovery, a time for growth. It is not a long, lost weekend.

• • •

If one image beyond sunshine is entwined with summer, it is being out of school. Once the textbooks have been handed in and the report cards sent home, for some the real learning begins. Oh, most certainly book learning is important, and our society does greatly underestimate it. But perhaps the most important lessons of life come when we walk dusty country roads or lakeside trails, places where the best opportunities to sharpen our observations are provided.

When a boy, I'd sometimes amble along the dirt road leading past the cornfields, discovering deer prints left the night before in the soft soil or the butterflies whose patterned wings rival in beauty any painting to come from an artist's palette.

On occasion, I'd stretch out in the field left unseeded that year by my father and watch the panorama of clouds reshape themselves across the brilliant blue sky. In the meadow, all seemed far away: the thumb-sized farmhouse, a distant tractor's drone, the tufts of clouds suspended upon the horizon.

Out there it was a whole new world, and if you fell into the prickle of extremely tall grass, a truly unique one as well: One in which the insects grew in size as they flicked past you, the buzz of their wings a high-pitched whine; in which the smell of loam, of plants decayed and of plants growing from such death, surrounded you; in which the minute taste of salt swathed across the inside of your mouth actually could be sensed now that you were not bombarded by a million other distractions competing for your attention.

• • •

Too often, we don't bother to see what is around us. Loaded with responsibilities, we do in summer exactly what we do the rest of the year: Wash dishes, write our term papers, fold our laundry.

We live by the words of Hesiod, that great Greek didactic poet: "It will not always be summer: build barns."

But consider there is as great a chance the barn will be built as there is some freak accident will blind us.

Sightless Helen Keller once challenged readers, "If you could see for just 24 hours, what would you choose (to look at)?"

If you had only 24 hours left to see, would you choose to build the barn?

• • •

When in first grade, I got into trouble with my teacher for disagreeing over the meaning of the Aesop fable "The Ant and the Grasshopper." In that story, grasshopper didn't spend his summer storing food like ant did. When winter came, grasshopper had nothing to eat. The details after that are grim.

"What did the grasshopper do during all of that time?' I asked. "Didn't he read books? Maybe he painted a picture. Didn't he visit his friends and family?"

"He didn't do any of that," my teacher said. "He did nothing all summer."

"Nothing? That's impossible. He must have done something."

"No, he did nothing at all."

If my teacher was right, then grasshopper's death was irrelevant. After all, if you do absolutely nothing, you're as good as dead anyway.

But nobody does "nothing." And who's to judge when idleness is a waste of time? The discovery of fire, after all, must have came about by someone idling observing how flames spread.

• • •

This is not to say hard work doesn't have its place or offer its own pleasures. After seeing how fire leaps from branch to branch, the tricky part is breaking off a lit bough then containing it in a pit. But idly enjoying the fruits of such labors then becomes the reward.

• • •

But should the summer be spent only building barns or storing food? Doesn't one first need to imagine a barn and all of its possibilities? And to do that, doesn't one need to be aware of the wider world to fuel the mind?

If idleness leads to reflection, then summer was not wasted. It only was a beginning.

(originally published July 13, 2003)