First Cicadas of the Summer
I heard my first cicadas of the summer.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve kept my ears open — listening for them, wondering where they were, when I would finally hear them buzzing among the tall trees.
Leading up to this summer, there has been much hype in the media about the impending swarm of cicadas, which has probably given me the false expectation of witnessing them far sooner than what is actually expected.
This year’s spawn of perennial cicadas has been labeled Brood X.
There are two varieties of cicada broods: annual and perennial. Annual broods emerge each summer, while perennial broods remain underground for 17 years before finally emerging. Unlike the bland green and brown appearance of annual broods, perennial cicadas possess striking black and orange coloring.
I think cicadas sound vaguely extraterrestrial—like aliens from science fiction, or an ominous radio transmission from space. After a brood of cicadas emerges, the sound of everything else is drowned out by the static drone of their mating calls. The thrum of cicadas is inescapable, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
For me, a forest full of cicadas loudly humming their otherworldly, ambient white-noise never fails to evoke pangs of nostalgia for idyllic summers past. All of us long for those elusive, fleeting summer joys. Usually, our minds are pulled back into the blissful freedom of childhood summer vacations.
But not all happy summer memories are born in childhood.
One of mine is from the summer of 2016, when I was 21 years old. Perennial cicadas surfaced that year while I was visiting my best friend in Athens; he was taking summer classes at Ohio University at the time. I could hear them during my visit, like a constant thunder — so loud it pierced through the walls of my best friend’s apartment, overwhelming the volume of the television and even the music speakers.
Deafening.
That was my final June prior to starting senior year of college — after which, summer breaks would be left behind for the “adult” world.
I have been brooding over this new brood of cicadas.
Cicadas are creatures of nostalgia. They embody an abstract nostalgia for things long lost, back somewhere far away. Cicadas are those buried feelings and memories which surface rarely—whether it’s around the same time every year, or only once every 17 years.