Breezy and clear. A cicada lands on the chair beside me and emits a brief, mechanical purr, red eyes glowing like the lights on an ambulance, before flying directly into a railing, dropping to the floor and relaunching into the yard.
cicadas
June 20, 2025
Breezy and cool—a front at last. A train keens in the distance. The whispery discourse of trees in which cicadas have lapsed for a few long moments into silence.
June 18, 2025
Rain and fog. I’m beginning to feel sorry for the 17-year cicadas whose one summer in the sun has so far been so sodden. I watch one go motoring past, wings mirroring the white sky.
June 17, 2025
The white noise of cicadas gives voice to the fog. I spot a second-year common mullein just beginning to raise her flagpole, velvety leaves wearing coats of cloud.
June 16, 2025
An intensely green lushness makes an orphan out of the brown pile of juniper cuttings at the woods’ edge—last winter’s one spot of green. At 7:10, in the pouring rain, the first cicada starts up.
June 12, 2025
Breezy and cool. A brown moth flutters into the last of the dame’s-rocket. Sunlight glints on the isinglass wings of a cicada heading for the treetops.
March 16, 2025
Dawn arrives between showers. I think about all the cicada larvae of Brood XIV stirring under the ground, preparing for the last and most eventful spring of their lives.
July 29, 2024
A cabbage white butterfly dances in a patch of sun—the method to a madness of perfectly random moves. An annual cicada’s slowly falling note.
September 2, 2023
Clear, cold, and still. Two hours after sunrise, the sun finally strikes my face. Random chirps from migrant birds. The first cicada starts up.
August 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.
August 20, 2022
Sun through a scrim of cloud. The first white snakeroot is in bloom. A Linne’s cicada rattles like a bad engine.
August 24, 2021
A stratum of sunlit leaves forming in the forest understory. A cicada wakes up. Under the house, something coughs.
August 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.
August 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.