Researchers who study time often refer to "wild time" as "time as time that has not been domesticated by mechanical clocks or calendars."
Now, when katydids and crickets start to fill the nights with their rasping, a person might enter the wilderness that lies ahead by keeping pace with the measures of the insect metronomes.
Free from society's clocks and calendars, the crickets and katydids create an audible structure under which blackberries ripen and grackles come together, flocking before migration, and starlings spin in murmurations, swoop and dive over the bare wheat fields.
In the undergrowth, adult robins guide their offspring, teaching them migration calls. Thistledown unravels to the wild time of crickets and katydids, and seed pods form on the trumpet vines. Ragweed heads up as patches of yellow appear on cottonwood trees. Black walnut leaves start to fall. All across the country, Japanese knotweed blooms in the open fields and along the fence rows. And the touch-me-nots burst at the slightest touch, and that is wild time for sure.
