Of summer and other memories

July is here and summer is now officially on a climb to its zenith. What gives it away, apart from the fireworks I hear tonight cascading over the skies of the large city near my small city, is the maraca-like song of the cicadas during the day.

This ugliest of bugs (a science fiction cross between a gigantic fly and a grasshopper) is a surefire sign that summer is full-fledged-ly here. And while the cicada song, a mix of maracas and hissing-snake rattle, is, to say the least, a bit unnerving, I like to hear them because they confirm that this is, indeed, full summer.

Eons ago, I was in Washington, D.C., when they were in one of their 17-year cycles of crawling out of the earth and propagating like a biblical plague. I don't know how I survived those weeks of cicada infestation with the seemingly intoxicated kamikaze bugs flying all over the place helter skelter. I was convinced that if one of them so much as grazed me I would lose my mind (and I'm not speaking metaphorically).

Thankfully, none of the cicadas came near me and I obviously survived. I hope never to have to endure another cicada plague (which is likely beyond what nature can promise me as long as I live in cicada country).

This July also marks my and my husband's 13th wedding anniversary. As my husband likes to joke, ours was the only shotgun wedding where the bride (me) wasn't the one pregnant. My husband (then my boyfriend of 18 months) proposed to me in May and we had planned to marry in August or September. But I wanted my sister to be my maid-of-honor and she was in the last months of her second pregnancy.

A few days after I had called her to give her the happy news, she called back hemming and hawing about the fact that her gynecologist had said she would not be able to fly after the first week in July. Could I ask my husband-to-be if he would be willing and ready to marry me in a month and a half?

My husband, bless his soul, said the hardest part was making the decision to marry so he didn't mind a bit if we did it earlier rather than later. Thus, our wedding was set for the first week in July. I refused to even consider getting married on the 4th (for many obvious and not-so-obvious reasons) so the next best day was the 5th. Thus, I went into "event-planning" mode and organized and executed a lovely, if tiny, wedding in less than two months.

In Puerto Rico we have a saying: En un martes, ni te cases, ni te embarques. Well, we got married on a Tuesday at 5:30 in the evening in the southwestern town in which the U.S. Navy staged its fateful invasion of the island (also in July) back in 1898. The town is about three hours away from the capital city, where almost everyone who came to the wedding lived.

Despite all the small contretemps that happened -- including having no water for a few hours after we'd been kayaking on the ocean, losing electricity so that instead of the wedding march some other song played when I walked in, and the spurts of rain that fell on my father and me as we did our walk outdoors into the ceremony -- it was a great wedding.

It's not surprising that I love July. This month is hot and tropical and, even with the cicadas, it's the month in which my husband and I pledged our life together. It's been 13 long and sometimes difficult and mostly wonderful years. This July, on our anniversary, I'll tell my husband that Mario Benedetti said the words already and said them best:

si te quiero es porque sos
mi amor mi cómplice y todo
y en la calle codo a codo
somos mucho más que dos.