Clear, cold, and still. Two hours after sunrise, the sun finally strikes my face. Random chirps from migrant birds. The first cicada starts up.
cicadas
8/24/2022
First day of a dry high. Sunlight seeping down the trees. By the time it reaches the forest floor, the cicadas have started up.
8/20/2022
Sun through a scrim of cloud. The first white snakeroot is in bloom. A Linne’s cicada rattles like a bad engine.
8/24/2021
A stratum of sunlit leaves forming in the forest understory. A cicada wakes up. Under the house, something coughs.
8/9/2021
Sunny and humid. The electric whine of annual cicadas ebbs and flows. A hummingbird flies into the forest’s wall of leaves at top speed.
8/25/2016
The cicada chorus ebbs and swells. I notice the big tulip tree has shed all its drought-yellowed leaves from a month ago and is green again.
7/23/2016
As the heat builds, the cicadas’ electric drills fall silent one by one. Coneflowers wilt until they look like yellow jellyfish.
6/9/2016
A weird cry, like an alarm clock keening for consummation: a lone 17-year cicada, far from the main body of its brood. It stops. It resumes.
8/31/2015
In the course of an hour, the only bird calls are from a couple of crows. But there are four kinds of crickets, a cicada, a distant jet.
8/15/2015
Hazy and warm. As the sun climbs, the cicada chorus grows, and the field cricket in the garden chirps faster and faster.
8/9/2015
Workmen up at the other house: the whine of an annual cicada in the trees alternates with an actual electric saw.
8/3/2015
A cicada lies on its back on the porch, legs churning the air. I turn it over and the dog gives it a good, close reading with her nose.
7/13/2015
Backlit by the sun against the dark woods, a swarm of lekking gnats, their Brownian motion now faster, now slower. An annual cicada’s whine.
9/5/2014
It’s hot. At last the annual cicadas sound fully charged. The air is alive with tiny insects in non-intersecting orbits back-lit by the sun.