These bug-eyed bugs about to descend (ascend, actually) on us will be loud and they will be everywhere. Hordes of black, shrimp-size creatures with transparent wings clinging to trees and poles and buildings, all buzz buzzing away.
They will be annoying. Here’s something to contemplate that’s even more annoying: If you were here for the last cicada invasion, you were 17 years younger then.
You were more carefree. You had more hair. You could stay up late and not feel it the next day.
If you have a child graduating from high school this year, he or she was in diapers the last time you saw a 17-year cicada. (Yes, it’s official, your babies are leaving.)
Chances are you have been thinking lately about life on cicada time.
And maybe you have been thinking about the next time the cicadas arrive, which can make you even more melancholy. If you are a Boomer (a species sometimes as annoying as cicadas), you will officially be old. And no, 70 will not be the new 50.
There’s nothing like an every-17-years invasion of bugs to remind you of the inexorable passage of time. The average Illinoisan will witness four cicada cycles in a lifetime, unless you move to New Jersey. If you live well and you’re lucky, you might be around for five or, at the very most, six.
That’s it. That’s life measured in cicada time.
But look at it this way; it’s a heck of a lot longer and more interesting than the life of the cicadas. They live underground, in the dark, on tree-root sap for 17 years. Then they emerge for a brief six to eight weeks of frenzied activity in the sunlight. They have one hot date — all that buzzing is the “hey baby, look over here” mating call of the male to female. Then the male buys the farm. Once the female has laid 400 to 600 eggs in trees, she dies too.
By mid-summer they will all be gone. The offspring produced in this cicada ritual will have hatched and burrowed underground to spend the next 17 years sucking sap in the dark, just like mom and dad did.
Come 2024, they’ll be back. And if you’re lucky, you’ll still be around, lamenting the passage of cicada time.
