A Lesson and a Lullaby
.
In 1987, I remember playing at my cousin’s house, in what was then the more rural side of the Washington D.C. suburbs. My uncle lived off a two-lane country road and had this great backyard that was full of large stones and boulders and lots of tall oak and pine trees. From a kid’s perspective, it was a jungle, offering many places to explore and set up secret backyard forts. But in the spring of 87, we weren’t the only ones who were hiding out in that yard.
It was the year of the Brood X cicada, a peculiar insect that emerges only once every seventeen years. In the late spring, like little zombies, they begin to dig their way from deep underground, usually around the trees in which they will crawl up, leaving old, dried exoskeletons in their wake before flying off to find food and a mate. There are billions of these critters and the piles of carcasses that surround trees in more than a dozen Mid-Atlantic states is a sight to behold.
The bugs, themselves, are pretty terrifying up close. They average two inches in length and have blood-red eyes, and they fly about not caring where or on whom they land. They are straight out of a nightmare of Biblical plague proportions. But the thing that I most remember about these insects is the noise they make. Their collective mating call creates an electrical buzzing sound that reaches 100 decibels.
That year, I remember growing accustomed to their calls, and what I looked forward to was the end of the day when I could open my window, climb into bed, and fall asleep to their deafening lullaby, which was usually accompanied by the rumble of an approaching thunderstorm.
I’d forgotten that 2021 would be the year that the Brood X cicadas would re-emerge. It wasn’t until a few friends hosted overnight watch-a-thons on Facebook that I remembered, seeing their pictures and live videos of these critters climbing up their host trees and preparing to molt. I admired the dedication of my friends and their intrigue into the world of entomology, but it was the instinctual patience of the cicadas that I admired more.
Most of the world is winding down from a year-long isolation as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and we are all quite agitated to free ourselves from the shackles of our face coverings and socialize in close proximity again. One year has been stressful. I can’t imagine what seventeen years would feel like. Admittedly, cicadas are in nymph form for a good portion of that time, but still. They live the majority of their existence in the darkness of tree roots that they inhabit until their bodies urge them to climb, climb, climb to the surface, where they will spend their final month in this strange new world of daylight, completing their sole mission that will ensure the survival of their species.
What a lesson in patience.
This evening, I walked outside after an early summer thunderstorm blew through the region, and I listened to the cicadas. Most of them have finished their work and their bodies will go back to the ground to nourish the life that will come, but there are still a few left. It will be 2038 before the next generation of Brood X will emerge. I don’t know what the world will look like then. I don’t know if I’ll be around to greet them. But I do know that this year, until the very last one is gone, I want to climb into bed at night, and with windows open, fall asleep to their lullaby.
