About a month after I was born, billions of Brood X cicadas came out of the ground, mated, then died. Over the next few years, I learned to walk, to read, to count. I began and quit dance lessons, piano lessons, youth orchestra, soccer, basketball, tennis. I made friends and grew apart from them. I discovered the X-Files, make-up, boys, pop punk, Jagermeister. All the while, those cicadas’ progeny were underground, sucking on xylem from tree roots, waiting to get large enough to come out again as adults.
A month after I turned 17, they came out again — my first encounter with them. “by the way, i really hate cicadas,” I wrote in my Livejournal at the time. (The all lowercase was a very important part of my identity then.) “i know they’re harmless, but they’re just so creepy. then on top of that, they make that strange noise and there are just so eng many. ksjdkjslaks i feel squeamish just thinking about them.”
Now, half my life later, I am back in the same place, reporting on cicadas while also retracing my steps from the last time they appeared. I take stock of what is the same: as I do my work, I am at the same desk where I wrote that Livejournal entry, but the desktop on which I typed that is off in a corner, unused essentially since the last cicada emergence. While I’m at home, my mom makes the same foods I loved as a teenager, and my dad reminds me not to stay out too late when I go out with friends. I slip back into reading a lot of poetry and listening to the same albums and mixes, CDs burned lovingly by friends, contents labeled with sharpie.
But what has changed? In the time it’s taken cicadas to grow, my friends, too, have brought a new generation into the world. The trees that support them have grown, too, something I feel silly to be surprised about every time I look out into my backyard and find that my once-clear view is blocked by towering evergreens. There’s a new traffic light down the street from my house. I have lived my entire adult life so far, molting from my Kentucky nymphal state, growing wings, and going on the great search for a tree to climb.
And now, my previous hatred of cicadas has evolved into reverence. (I’d be lying if I said my outlook wasn’t at least partly altered just by learning their proper genus name: the Magicicada.) I feel a tenderness towards newly molted cicadas, their outsides soft and pearly white before maturing into the tougher exoskeleton the world demands. After only 15 months of relative isolation — 17 years is unimaginable — I, too, feel raw and new. It feels good to come out of my hole and see the rest of my species, to gather and fly aimlessly and scream, scream, scream.
Image: Magicicada nymph in Cherokee Park, Louisville, KY.