May in the riverside town
A quiet essay about May in Chizhou, a small city on the Yangtze, where the river rises before the rains, the classroom windows stay open late, and the first heat of the year arrives with the sound of cicadas still learning their song.
The Yangtze behaves differently in May. For most of the year it sits in its bed, a broad grey presence that the town ignores out of habit, but in late spring it begins to rise, slowly, visibly, and the people who live by it start to glance at the waterline when they cross the bridges. The river that was a background becomes a fact. My school stands a few streets back from the bank, close enough that on humid afternoons you can smell the water without seeing it.
The term, by May, has settled into its longest stretch. The novelty of the year is gone, the exam is not yet near, and the days have the quality of a held breath. We open the classroom windows and the breeze comes in warm, carrying the noise of the city and, increasingly, the sound of crickets and the first tentative cicadas, testing their song in the late afternoons before they find their full voice in June. The light lasts longer now. At 6 p.m., with the evening study session just beginning, the sun is still above the buildings, and the classroom is a room of long shadows and moving dust.
I have started to notice the town again, the way you notice a place when you are on the edge of leaving it, even though I am not leaving yet. The flat lake on the west side of the city, with its reed banks and its causeway that people walk at dusk; the small hill with the pagoda on top, where the old men fly kites in spring and where, in May, the grass is tall enough to hide a sitting figure; the streets of the old town, narrow and shaded, where the shade itself is a kind of merchandise in the afternoon. None of this is remarkable. It is simply mine, and May is the month when I seem to see it most clearly.
There is a particular sound to this time of year in our school: the afternoon thunderstorm. The heat builds all day, the air turns yellow-grey, and then the rain arrives, suddenly, drumming on the metal roofs of the covered walkways between buildings, filling the gutters within minutes. Everyone stops writing to watch it. The storm is loud enough to end conversation and private enough to allow it; the classroom becomes a room of people looking out at the same sheet of water, each with their own thought. When it passes, the air is clean and cool for exactly one evening, and the next day the heat returns, a little stronger, as if the storm had only been tuning the season.
The evenings are the best part. Study sessions end, and the street outside the school fills with students walking home under streetlights that have only just begun to seem unnecessary. The shops along the main road have pulled out their summer stock, and the ice-cream freezers hum against the open doors. On the way home I sometimes detour to the river wall, where the water, higher than it was a month ago, moves with a different, heavier sound, and the city lights run in long lines down the current. Standing there, with the first true heat of the year still in the air, it is easy to believe that summer will be long and that everything still ahead of it will be good.
May, in the riverside town, is the month of almost: almost summer, almost grown, almost gone. The river rises, the cicadas warm up, and the students in the classroom by the bank keep their eyes on the clock and their windows on the light. It will not stay this way for long, and I know it; but for now, with the season holding its breath, I am content to hold mine too.