Cicadas

The cicadas have been out in Morgantown, as part of their seventeen-year cycle. Or so I'm told. I wasn't here seventeen years ago. In suburban Baltimore, they came out in 1970, when I was in college. They were everywhere except our street, which was constructed in 1953, which must have torn up the cicadas' natural habitat.

In Suncrest, our neighborhood at the north end of Morgantown, people seem especially proud of their lawns. Our street, consisting of twelve homes in six semi-detached structures, has an association. Every Tuesday, a guy named Roger comes by and mows all our lawns. At the end of April, I heard someone else outside. He told me he was part of the lawn team and was spraying weed killer. I questioned him about what it was and he assured me it was not harmful, only we should keep our cat inside for an hour. I had my doubts.

Our street is quiet. Most of the cicadas came up from the ground and died.

Still, we can hear the cicadas from the empty lot behind the houses across the street from us. I was just reading that the cicadas eat tree sap, not enough to harm a mature tree. The maple in our yard is covered with cicadas who must have flown in.

There was a cicada festival last weekend at the Core Arboretum. They had dishes made with cicada, and studied them in detail. I watched one half-dead bug bravely climb our tree after I took him off our porch and placed him by the tree trunk. They don't bite or sting, and they seem tame enough if you pick them up. And while many find their song annoying, or deafening, depending on where you live. I find their sound soothing, a sign that nature still has some say in our urban world, and a warning about what happened to them where chemicals were sprayed.

I like living in a rare and unique time, both short-term, as the cicadas reportedly will be gone next month, and in the longer sense, in the times and places I've lived in sixty-seven years. I'd love to be here in seventeen years, although I will be eighty-three, and I don't know of any man in my family who lived to that age. I could pick up a cicada and say to it "I knew your parents."