The Cicadas Are Coming

Here in middle Tennessee, the local news stations appear to be enjoying giving frequent reminders that our state is about to play host to the cicadas of Brood XIX. This is the brood that comes around every 13 years.

I vividly remember sitting in my office at work thirteen years ago as a 27 year old, watching one of my coworkers jump as they were trying to walk to their car because a cicada had just smacked into them and suddenly being struck by the horrifying notion that the next time the cicadas came around, I would be 40.  I went from laughing to having a small existential crisis.  Well, here we are, 13 years later and the cicadas are coming.  Along with a looming birthday for me next month. 

Even though my life looks completely different than the last time the cicadas visited, these thirteen years have gone by in a blink.  Last time the cicadas were here, I was a 27-year-old single social worker and now I am an almost 40-year-old mom.  And looking back even further, the cicadas’ visit the time before their last visit, I was a 14-year-old middle schooler.  When you start measuring your life in cicada cycles, you can fully appreciate how life is “like a mist” as James 4 puts it.

“Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”

James 4:13-15

At fourteen, I remember walking across the campus of my school to the tennis courts as we were doing a tennis course in PE that spring and we would use our rackets to fend off the swarming cicadas as we crossed campus.  That was the first spring I actually remember a periodical cicada brood and they brought more curiosity and hilarity than philosophical reflection with their swarming, buzzing us as we tried to walk anywhere outside, and their loud buzzing. 

When they came back thirteen years later, that former middle schooler now owned a home and was working as a nursing home social worker.  And here they come again to greet more vast life changes.  This time around, I’m not sure how it will go but I keep envisioning myself mostly trying to keep my toddler from trying to catch and eat the cicadas. 

The existential crisis of the cicadas grows looking forward instead of back.  James 4 says, “you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”  Of course, I have no way of knowing if I will be around in thirteen years to see the next generation of cicadas, but if I am, I had another realization a few weeks ago as the news stories of the cicadas were ramping up.  I was one year old the first time I was on earth when the thirteen-year cicadas came to Tennessee.  Of course, I have no memory of them, but now here I am with my own one year old.  She will be on the same cycle as me age-wise each time the cicadas come around.  That means that she will be a teenager the next time they come and I will be 53.  Then she will be 27, and I will be 66.  When she is my age now, I will be 79 to greet the cicadas.  My next number has a 9 at the start of it.  This cicada existential crisis spirals quickly.  Like a mist indeed.

I really don’t mean for this to come across as a bleak post about death and how quickly life goes by.  Certainly, the reemergence of this particular brood of cicadas here in Tennessee every thirteen years can serve as that reminder, but it also has been a very positive reflection for me.  Thirteen years ago at age 27, I could have scarcely imagined the life I have now.  If I could go back and tell that young woman struggling though some hard days as a young social worker about what life would look like the next time the cicadas came, she probably wouldn’t have believed me.  But I would give her a hug and tell her to hang in there.  In thirteen years, you’ll be wrangling a stubborn toddler and have all new challenges.  But they’ll all be good.

News outlets have been trying to educate us all about cicadas and trying to make their coming as dramatic as possible.  Since there is another periodical brood that is coming this year, the 17 year cicadas, the media is making declarations along the lines of looming “cicada-geddon” and reminding us that the last time the two broods appeared at the same time, it was in the year 1803. 

I guess I find all of that pretty interesting but not quite interesting enough to travel to the places where both broods will be located to observe this “cicada-geddon” for myself like some bug enthusiasts are planning to do.  I do appreciate though that there are people in the world that love to study the natural world so much that they have been anxiously awaiting this event for years and are looking forward to finding out if the two broods will cross-breed in a “will they/won’t they” anticipation that rivals the way other people watched Ross and Rachel for years.

As for me, I will be staying here in Tennessee to greet the “Great Southern Brood” as they start popping up out of the ground any day now after their thirteen years away.  Welcome back friends.  Look out for birds (and tennis rackets).  Enjoy your few weeks above ground noisily mating and having way too much fun buzzing us humans.  And I’ll try not to think too much about how the next time we’ll meet, God willing, I’ll be 53 years old with a teenage daughter the same age I was only two of your life cycles ago.  Your lives above ground may be short, but we humans aren’t too far behind you.