Cicadas

The cicadas are in full song. Today I saw my first molted cicada skin clinging to the fence.

 

My boy Tom is learning to identify such things as insect noises. He is fascinated by crickets and is tuned in to the cicadas’ drone as well–though he does not agree with me on their name.

Tom: “I hear a potato.”

Brett: “It’s called a cicada. Can you say ‘cicada’?”

Tom: “No. It’s a potato.”

The summer before my mother died, I came home to help her get to her radiation therapy. In the years I had been gone, the space in the house that I had previously occupied filled up with other things and projects, so I lived in a pickup camper trailer on blocks in the yard. I worked the night shift at a factory so as to be available to drive her to the hospital in the morning. That summer, the dark and the trees spread over the camper, and when I arrived home at 4am and climbed into the bunk over where the cab would be, the cicadas’ two-tone glissando often kept me up until the sun rose.