Waiting In Vain

I waited for the cicadas. I was excited about the cicadas. Two specific periodical broods are aligning, bringing their cacophony of screeching songs to the evening soundtrack for the first time since 1803. I’d hoped they might be the silver lining of living through the power outage last week.

Alas, there were no cicadas.

So yesterday, I checked the cicada map, which I probably should have done before I got all excited because it appears I would have to drive at least six hours to hear them.

I’m not embarking on a road trip in search of buzzing insects. I live along a bayou in southeast Texas. There is a plethora of buzzing insects on the other side of the window, and I don’t want to experience the much-hyped cicada event that badly. I’ll stick to the every-August, run-of-the-mill cicadas that scream my feelings about the late-summer southeast-Texas heat every year. They’re nothing special, but they’re dependable and there’s something to be said for that.

That said, cicadas really are something special. The nymphs of annual cicadas stay underground for up to five years, before ascending into the trees to sing. Or scream, or screech… potato, potahto. The nuance is missed if one is not a female cicada, at any rate.

Cicadas are found in literature dating back to Homer’s Iliad, and in art from the Shang Dynasty. According to Wikipedia, the exoskeleton of a cicada can be worn as hair or clothing decoration by attaching their hook-like legs to the intended spot. I think the cicada should probably be dead first, but live cicadas are a favorite plaything for many dogs. I’ll include a YouTube link at the bottom of this page. Dogs catching cicadas are one of my favorite things right now.

For me, cicadas represent the lazy, dogdays of summer (pun intended). They remind me of old oak trees dripping Spanish moss. Of walking barefoot on warm asphalt streets, after dark, and the tarantulas who like to do the same. Of the end of a summer that lasted forever, and was at the same time, much too short. It would soon be September and the pause button pressed in late May would be tapped again, propelling the world back into motion.

None of this is real for me anymore, but the memories are vivid and tangible. I’m still the barefoot girl, walking down the street with her friends after dark, smelling of Coppertone and showing off our sun-burnished skin and sun-streaked hair, in a time we knew was fleeting and special, but wasted anyway, as is the privilege of youth.

Deborah Vance, Jean Smart’s character in Hacks, tells her young co-writer, Ava, “the magic of ‘one day’ is that it’s all ahead of you, but for me, ‘one-day’ is now. If there’s something I want to do, I have to do it now.”. This is going to stick with me for a long time. Possibly, forever.

Here’s a link to that episode. It’s worth a watch if you haven’t seen it, but it really hits if you can relate to Deborah on this level. https://youtu.be/XT59pxAZgHs?si=ehdseh2qFtlAsktk

The cicadas know. For them, there is only now. That’s true for all of us. We can tell ourselves that we have time, but the reality is that there is only now.

Time to go climb the tree, and sing. Or scream.

As promised, dogs and cicadas: https://youtu.be/A9umxwJApUg?si=Z5_lnjgf6dMfx_MF

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