Sister Cicada by Linda Wright

Photo by Sagar Vasnani

Sister Cicada

Creative Nonfiction

Midway into 2021, I open an email from my oldest sister.

“Dear sister,” it starts.

Not sure when I have ever seen “dear sister” on anything other than a birthday card, I am taken aback and down a neurodivergent alleyway where I give myself the slip. Then I snap to, read the rest, and realize why she is feeling this way.

It’s the cicadas.

“17 years is a long time,” she writes, “The last time they came you were living here and…”

It gets to me.

I start digging up facts and reflecting. Multiple accounts in countless articles indicate that I am not the only one up to this. Apparently, eight states worth of generation X have been thinking about its life thanks to third encounters with Brood X.

The first encounter was the closest for most of us. My first emergence marked my sophomore year and suspended it like an orange cafeteria chair 12 feet above the sidewalk in front of South Lakes High School. This was a trick my letter jacketed love pulled off, and pure physics. We sat in the chairs he had hung over the edge of the balcony, the backs held fast to the railing by our weight. We hovered and held hands and wondered where we would be when the cicadas came back. Most of all we knew, no matter what, that we would always know that we did this, that we would always be able to find ourselves again, for a moment, in that moment. And, we do.

‘87 was also the year that Medley and Warnes came out with “The Time of My Life,” Starship released “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now,” and George Michael produced “I Want Your Sex,” all of which could have been sung at any given moment by any given cicada.

True as that is, if I want something to hold on to, I am going to need far more than Google can give me. So, I reach for one of my journals and emerge an hour later, with this sentence, written in May of 2004:

After seventeen years the cicadas have surfaced, seething, sounding the same alarm as when I was fifteen.

I pick up where I left off… the same alarm as when I was only thirty-two.

Here and now, they are a tinnitus of the life of my misophonic mind.

They are drowning out the lawn mowers, usurping summer’s standard noise of annoyance in a high-pitched buzzing blare, broadcasting 90 full decibels of alien invasion that could give even the War of the Worlds a run for its devastation. How on earth can the males tune in to the wing-clicked-yin of the female for all of the abdomen-thumped-yang of their motor-sans-muffler pickup screech? They have five weeks above ground and they are going to live it out loud, louder, loudest.

Simultaneously relentless and temporary, these minions of Hades emerge from the underworld, scythes of shrill sound raised, to cut our lives like lemon meringue pies into fifths or even only fourths. When they come we rewind to the last time they were here, fast forward to a future unforeseeable, and find ourselves quartered as finitely as a fiscal year.

They are certain, these monstrous vermin. They are the force of death and taxes compressed into billions of grotesque exoskeletons that explode in a crawling, climbing, flying plague of thick black bodies and orange-red eyes. And not just two eyes. They have five eyes, three arranged between the bulging ones like an unnerving seventh chakra.

None of these eyes seem to help them navigate or perceive depth. In addition to being hideous noise polluters that force us to think about the last thing we want to think about, they keep thudding into things.

They bounce off signs, ricochet off of windshields, and rebound haplessly from our faces onto our shirts. Recently, Biden himself was bumped on the tarmac between Cadillac and Air Force One. And, think of all the limb joints and pointy feet. Extracting even one from your hair is a process that is likely to be as long as your hair.

Oh, you nasty bugs.

As all of this is annoyance upon agitation against a backdrop of endless ephemeral whirring measuring our mortality, what we wonder every time they come around is: Why the ambivalence? We understand our abhorrence. What is it that we like?

First off, though plaguesque, they symbolize survival. They stick it out underground for as long as takes to raise a human and send it off to college, and resurface with a zest not unlike what we are experiencing now as we emerge from our dormancy and home offices.

And then, ugly and loud as they are, they are unique. Nothing else appears this number of times. They are frequent enough to be familiar, infrequent enough to serve as milestones for the seasons of our lives: Dependence, independence, taking on dependents, and, if all goes well, the hearth of winter is divine dependence.

Lastly, our affinity for these anti-heroes is due to their regularity. The predictability. We don’t know their reason for being, but we do know when they will be showing up. In a world where change seems the only constant- and now even the changes seem to be going off cycle- any rhythm is a reassurance, a relief- even one so clumsy and clamorous.

So that’s it. We like things to be cyclic, distinct and never-ending. The cicadas mean Life goes on. They have been returning since the ice age signaling that, short as life is, something stays the same. Please pass the rebirth. Virgil wrote about them over two millennia ago and we reduce our carbon emissions in the hopes that our descendants will too.

A story of coming of age over and over again, the cicadas are sounding the same alarm as they did when I was 15, as when I was 32: It’s our turn on the surface, under the sun. Seize it.

Photo by Stephen Walker

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The Author

Linda Wright teaches at Leibniz University Hannover’s English department and has two Spanish rescue dogs, Corazón and Alma, Heart and Soul, like many Argentine Tango lyrics, two Taizé songs and one page of the Great American Songbook.

Linda Wright