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.
cicadas
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.
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.
Clear, cold, and still. Two hours after sunrise, the sun finally strikes my face. Random chirps from migrant birds. The first cicada starts up.
First day of a dry high. Sunlight seeping down the trees. By the time it reaches the forest floor, the cicadas have started up.
Sun through a scrim of cloud. The first white snakeroot is in bloom. A Linne’s cicada rattles like a bad engine.
A stratum of sunlit leaves forming in the forest understory. A cicada wakes up. Under the house, something coughs.
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.
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.
As the heat builds, the cicadas’ electric drills fall silent one by one. Coneflowers wilt until they look like yellow jellyfish.
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.
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.
Hazy and warm. As the sun climbs, the cicada chorus grows, and the field cricket in the garden chirps faster and faster.
Workmen up at the other house: the whine of an annual cicada in the trees alternates with an actual electric saw.