A small appreciation

Of cicadas

The soundtrack to the last couple of weeks has been the buzz of cicadas. Like thousands of toy chainsaws.

I’d been waiting for them. It’s not summer without their noise and their skins on the trees on the way to school. My son and I pluck them and put them on our clothes like brooches. He saves live ones from certain death by removing them from our driveway, where for some reason we’ve found quite a few just resting there on the warm concrete. It’s been sweet to discover he’s kind to insects (he tells me he ‘saves’ stick insects, too).

I’m not creeped out by cicada bodies, either. I love their sound: like little machines. But I admire their bodies just as much. Green, gold, black, wings like windows. I hate praying mantises and I can’t really do spiders on my skin though I’m fine with them on walls or surfaces. The cicada though, I can carry and calmly remove from my hair if I get in the way of a flight path. They feel heavy and make a ‘thwick’ sound when they collide with a human. Their feet always surprisingly present — spiky, grasping.

There’s also the nymph. That cicadas start as eggs that hatch nymphs that fall to the ground and bury themselves in soil to grow for three years (in New Zealand; other species nymph for far longer, 18 years I read somewhere) before they burst up out of the ground, climb the trunk of a tree, shed their skins and fly. That word, ‘Nymph’ carries magic and mystery. The raw cicada merges with the classical tree-goddess; hidden underground sucking on roots, awaiting signals from the soil (temperature) and their tree to tell them when come out.

This summer the cicadas have delighted me — so many of them and so sudden. But they’ve also made me sad, maybe even uncomfortable. Something about the collective: the synchronised emergence. How they roar together among the trees. Smack almost lazily into me as I thud towards my writing room — a giant of skin, all opaque, wingless.

The world is freaking me out. The cicadas sound one one day like good nature and on another day like a warning. I hear science-fiction in them, dark poetry, warnings.