They’re coming. Cicadas, in extraordinary numbers, will soon be waking from their seventeen-year naps. Really? It hasn’t been seventeen years since they last overwhelmed our area. I know this for certain. An intense cicada season is not forgotten. Our daughter was five, nearly a preschool graduate. Time does fly, but she’s only fourteen now, not twenty-two.
We hear it’s likely that the DC area will see more cicadas than usual this year. Various broods hatch every seventeen years, and this year’s Brood II is not the one that deluged us here in Northern Virginia in 2004. Fairfax County lies on the outer limit of this coming brood, so we may not feel the impact as strongly as places farther south. We’ve heard from my husband’s brother that the big, lumbering insects have indeed been spotted in their neighborhood in Richmond. Our daughter’s young cousins have never been party to a cicada invasion. I hope they enjoy it as much as she did.
D has always had a soft spot for oddball creatures. I admire her ability to find beauty where many cannot see it. She took an immediate liking to H’s pet box turtle, with us since we married, and before that, with H since he was a boy. Speedy (H was twelve when he named it) lives in a spacious glass box in our basement. He dines on raw ground beef, blueberries, and now, thanks to Kiko, canned dog food. Occasionally he gets the run of the basement or one of our larger bathrooms. D maintains that Speedy is terribly cute, although few would agree. As a toddler, she befriended the numerous toads that make their home each spring in our yard. She named them and discussed their differentiating traits of appearance and personality–how she could distinguish Squeaky, say, from Emily. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, she loves all the bizarre aquatic life of Cape Cod bay, including the spider crabs and the slimy moon snails. See Our Summer Village on the Cape, September 2013.
D’s five-year old self welcomed the cicadas enthusiastically. She picked them up, but gently, carefully. She enjoyed letting them amble along her arms, even on her face; she often had one perched on her nose. She loved their segmented, transparent wings, red bulbous eyes, stick-like legs, and coal-black armored bodies. I agree that each full-fledged cicada is a majestic specimen, and I find their uncertain, drunken flight very endearing. But I don’t care much for the nymph stage, in which they first appear after their long gestation period. They tend to tunnel out of the ground in unsettling droves around dusk, each cicada leaving a perfectly round, approximately half-inch hole in the earth. D didn’t even mind the look of these initial wingless, moist, pale beige creatures. Unattractive, I would call them. Or better yet, just plain icky. D wasn’t put off by the discarded exoskeletons that clung to tree branches, reminding me of some dreaded dermatological condition, or the pile-up that accumulated around the bases of our old maples. She wasn’t bothered by the noise, a sound like the roar of a hundred generators and power mowers. And she wasn’t even offended by the smell of pervasive decay, rather like the scent of rotting shrimp, that marks the winding down of cicada season.
It will be interesting to see the scope of this coming invasion and how it affects us this time. Will it be really be an onslaught? Will D, at fourteen, be as eager to mix it up with the cicadas as she was nine years ago? And what about Kiko? While he thrills at the hunt for the single buzzing cicada in the grass, this will be his first major brood year. Will he try to gorge himself on the insects, as some dogs do? Considering his finicky nature and dainty habits, this seems unlikely.
The Cicada Clock is ticking. Recent mornings here have been unusually chilly, but surely spring-like weather will arrive before long. Will the warming earth send these Rip Van Winkles of the insect world out just in time for H’s family’s Memorial Day visit? We were together, memorably, nine years ago for the holiday. As we watched D enjoy the kiddie rides at our local carnival, cicadas hitched rides on our clothing and in our hair. Occasionally a particularly clumsy new flyer would careen into one of our faces. Will this year’s start to summer bring with it another such noteworthy interspecies reunion?