Tuesday evening, May 11
It’s the biological event of the decade, and it’s almost here. The cicadas that have spent the last 17 years underground as nymphs, feeding on tree roots, are beginning to emerge. For the last few days, I’ve been seeing friends’ posts on Facebook, of those red-eyed 17-year cicadas, in neighborhoods only a few miles from me. So I go out after work with a friend and walk around the neighborhood, looking at the ground and the trees. At our feet: The holes the nymphs dig before they come out of the ground. Here and there, on a tree trunk: a shed exoskeleton. We spot no adults.
The parents of this batch of cicadas screamed from the trees of my parents’ suburban neighborhood in the summer of 2004. I was living in the basement, a new baby health writer at U.S.News & World Report, which was still a print magazine at the time. I wrote a story about the cicadas for Washington Post Express, a free newspaper that stopped publishing a couple of years ago.
I’ve been looking forward to the next coming of this next batch of cicadas ever since.
Wednesday evening, May 12
My plan to check my neighborhood trees every evening for the cicadas hits a snag: In other biological news, two friends are two weeks after their second dose of vaccine, so I drive up to their suburb to hug them and hold their four-month-old baby for the first time. No cicadas join us.
In 1987, I played with the grandparents of this year’s cicadas in my friend Malado’s backyard, about a mile from where I’m sitting right now. We gently squeezed the males so they’d squeal, and we built them little jungle gyms out of sticks. I don’t know if they liked jungle gyms. Probably not.
Thursday morning, May 13
On a morning walk, I spot my first live cicada, a scraggly-looking bug about six feet up a big tree.
At first I didn’t think it was alive. It’s obviously in bad shape. When a cicada crawls up a tree and sheds its nymph exoskeleton, the adult that emerges has wings for the first time. It sits and pumps those wings full of fluid. It looks like this one didn’t quite get through that step. So I assumed it was dead–but then it moved. Hang in there, bug.
Thursday evening, May 13
My genius plan to capture the long-awaited arrival of masses of cicadas for my Friday morning blog post (this blog post) officially fails. On the walk home from the gym – an outdoor class, my first in-person exercise in 14 months – I keep an eye on the trees, but no cicadas show themselves.
They’ll be here soon. And I’ll emerge from my apartment and hug friends, and enjoy the noisy biological event, and look forward to 2038 and whatever may happen between now and then.
Photos: Me
I have holes like that in my backyard, too. I wonder if they dig the holes ahead of time, but still stay underground awhile before coming out. I don’t see anything IN the holes on my property; maybe they have had a lot to dig out. Keep us posted!
Thanks for helping me think more about cicadas, and inspiring me to spend some time looking for clues & signs, holes & husks. Searching for cicada poems, I found an article (link below) in Atlas Obscura on the cicada poems of ancient Greece.
My favorite poem mentioned includes these very ornate lines by Meleager of Gadara, a first century B.C. Syrian-Greek poet:
“O, shrill-voiced insect; that with dewdrops sweet,
Inebriate, dost in the desert woodlands sing;
Perched in the spray-top with indented feet,
Thy dusky body’s echoing harp-like ring.
Come, dear cicada, chip to all the grove,
The Nymphs and Pan, a new responsive strain;
That I, in the noontide sleep, may steal from love,
Reclined beneath the dark overspreading plane.”
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/o-shrillvoiced-insect-the-cicada-poems-of-ancient-greece
So glad you wrote about the cicadas! They were a defining event in my childhood. At age 10, I was so fascinated watching them emerge from lawns that I almost missed the school bus multiple times. I even remember thinking, “I should try to have a kid when I’m 34 so she can be 10 when the next cicadas emerge.” When they came around 17 years later, I was just wrapping up my degree in biology – a field they probably inspired me to explore. I remember being late to my friend’s wedding because I was trying to help a cicada that was stuck out of its shell. I’m excited to see the cicadas this third time, and to share them with my kids (ages 9 and 13 – close enough, right?). I think they’re just magic.