I flew out of town Friday morning–my first post-vaccination travel!–and returned Tuesday afternoon. Those four days and change spent visiting my mom, my brother and his family in the Boston area were enough to come home to a Washington area that no longer sounded as it did before I left.
By which I mean, the high-pitched call of millions of cicadas buzzing for each other’s attention no longer greeted me the moment I stepped outside the house. Instead, it was the standard soundtrack of birds chirping that I’d heard most of the previous 17 years. Walking around the neighborhood was different too, without red- or orange-eyed bugs crawling underfoot, flying about, or occasionally landing on me.
Barely a month after Brood X emerged in volume in my neighborhood, the cicadas seem to be vanishing as quickly as they appeared. I now see remarkably few signs of their having been here at all; the weeping cherry tree I planted last spring had one small branch die off and show scars from female cicadas depositing their eggs there, but that seems to be the extent of the plant damage. And so far, the yard does not smell from an excess of decomposing cicadas, something I would very much like not to change.
I do have all the pictures I took of Brood X to remind me, plus a video or two. But as weirdly amusing as I found these harmless bugs and their lifecycle from nymph to adult (maybe seeing their mass emergence for a second time in my life reduced the freakout factor?), that was nothing compared to the interest my daughter developed in them. After more than a year of the pandemic penning in her horizons and, for most of that time, reducing school to a series of boxes on a screen, a fascinating spectacle of nature arrived in our backyard and around our neighborhood that she’d never seen before and wanted to learn more about.
As crazy as it may sound, I will miss the insect word’s answer to short-period comets just because of that. But these little alien-looking arthropods haven’t really gone; their offspring are now beginning a 17-year subterranean sojourn that will lead to them emerging en masse to surprise the children of 2038, and hopefully fascinate some of them.
Rob Pegoraro 