IT’S A LITTLE early to be looking back at the past year, but I have to say I’m very disappointed in 2014. It was supposed to be the Year of the Cicada, a time when millions of fat little bugs would emerge from the ground and loudly buzz around the nation’s capital, possibly joining the chorus to impeach the president. (The cries for impeachment haddeveloped a definite bug-like drone.)
Every 17 years or so, the cicadas are supposed to emerge from the ground where they have been gestating and, for the first week of their debut, bring a welcome distraction to life’s problems. By week two, however, they’ve become life’s problems, striking your head and other body parts as you walk outside, or even inside if you leave the screen door open too long for a cat who just ... can’t ... decide.
Fortunately, they all die after a couple weeks, but then venturing out into your backyard sounds like walking on corn flakes, if corn flakes were green and disgusting, and dead.
But none of that happened this year. Instead of the fun and natural wonder of watching bugs freeing themselves from their dark captivity and flying forth into the glorious light of day, we got nada.
No sitting on the front porch watching cicadas celebrating their new world or becoming lunch to passing birds, whichever comes first; no entomological moment of awe; no opportunity to provide learned commentary on nature’s brutal cycle of life to a wide-eyed grandchild. (“So that’s why you should stay in school and not take drugs.”)
Some town across the river got a few hundred of the bugs, but in my block in Washington, D.C., we found only one, lying on its back in a flower bed, and—like a dead corn flake—not moving.
Despite the limited utility a dead bug offers for important life lessons, our 3-year-old tried her best to gain something from the experience. She picked up the carcass and gently placed it inside an upturned plastic sand mold, where it lay in state for a week, even traveling with us by car for a few days at the beach. It was a somber funeral procession, punctuated by occasional bathroom stops.
Of course, in the give-and-take of summer travel, a makeshift sarcophagus will overturn frequently, and we almost lost it at various beach town sites. Mr. Whippy’s Ice Cream Parlor would have been its final resting place had the granddaughter not spotted it under the tire of our parked car. Setting down her cold treat and invoking the quiet reverence the occasion required, she carefully placed its body back in its little coffin. She then returned to her ice cream. (One can grieve only so much in a beach town.)
Sadly, as could have been expected, its body was eventually lost to us, possibly at another ice cream place. (He would have wanted it that way.)
SCIENTISTS ARE still puzzled why the cicadas remained underground, although it’s an election year, which may have something to do with it. A few million new arrivals without IDs would not be allowed to participate in the democratic process, so why bother to even show up?
Or maybe they just didn’t want to get hit with a bucket of ice water, an odd practice that’s trending this year. (Humans are a little weird compared to cicadas. And not just because we live much longer than is useful to nature.)
Wait, I think I see a cicada peeking from the ground over there. He’s struggling out of the dirt, trying to pull his whole body above the surface. Come on, little guy, you can do it! (Breaking news: Mitt Romney says he’s open to running again in 2016.) Now, back to that cicada.
Where’d he go?
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!