The Cicada Year

They have a polarizing effect, cicadas. I know the first time I saw one, seventeen years ago during the last emergence of Brood X, I wasn’t too keen. Something about their wild, ungainly flight, sending their big black bodies careening this way and that, was unsettling. I find it funny now—even charming—but I remember dodging them on the way to school back then, fending them off with an open umbrella and crying. In fact, most people I know are extremely unsettled by their presence, especially as concerns these periodical cicadas that crawl from the ground in hoards, coating tall trees with a vibrating, screaming layer of the clumsy, sex-crazed insects. No one who has experienced a periodical cicada year forgets it, that’s for sure.

Cicadas are virtually harmless: to those who are annoyed by them, cicadas are, at worst, a nuisance. The greatest threat they post is not to humans but to their plants—and, then, only to young saplings. Trees are the evolutionarily hardwired target for female cicadas who lay their eggs under the bark. The eggs have little-to-no effect on established trees, but their presence can cause younger trees to suffer. Otherwise, cicadas just go about their reproductive business for a few weeks in late Spring, screaming exultant choruses of rrrreeeeee-rrrreeeeeerr-rreeeeeeerrr-rreeeerrrr or occasionally bumbling into the hair or clothes of an unsuspecting passerby.

I grew out of my dislike for cicadas, developing an affection for them that many of my friends and family found strange. It’s hard to say what changed my mind, exactly (was it learning about the Appalachian custom of harvesting and eating nutrient-rich cicadas like manna from heaven? Was it listening to their plaintive music on hot summer nights under the stars?), but I know that an entry in the journal of Harlan Hubbard, a Kentucky writer and artist, had something to do with it. He wrote—making the common blunder of referring to cicadas as locusts, which they are not—in June of 1936:

“This is the year of the Seventeen Year locust, and should be somehow commemorated, for a few of these cycles span a man’s life. When they come forth again they will see changes in the face of the earth, hear new voices speaking of great events that we do not know of now.”

Seventeen years ago, there were many things I would never have guessed the next generation of little red-eyed critters would see in 2021. In terms of my own life, I did not know that I would have graduated college, worked at a dream job, met men who did not end up being the love of my life (and a man, who did), moved to the South, written two books, fallen ill with a yet-undiagnosed condition. Around me were the shifting lives of friends and family, of politics and nature, of passion and disease, and disappointment, and joy. During the day-to-day process of living life, it is challenging to measure the significance of certain events, or to understand how a small decision can become momentous when measured in periodical cicadas. They are the essence of time experienced through pattern. They are the relentless forward motion of time, propelled in an uncertain world full of uncertain people, that is comforting, predictable, instead of anxious, ominous.

In other words, cicadas remind us to be patient.

At the beginning of 2020, just before the world shut down in a series of unprecedented lockdowns due to the spreading coronavirus, I decided I wanted to do something to welcome the honorable Brood X back to the land of the living the following year. Unbeknownst to me (and the stirring cicada hoards beneath the earth) we were all soon to be plunged into a totally new experience of time, many of us confined to our homes, isolated from our families and our professions, suddenly with empty stretches of hours to fill with solitary occupation. Many of us took up new hobbies: we gardened, we cooked new dishes, we worked on improving our homes, we wrote, we cleaned, we talked, we read. I did all of these things, but I also learned to quilt. By hand. And the subject of my quilt would be cicadas.

Hand quilting is a slow process. You begin with a sketch of what you hope will become your handmade masterpiece. You say, “I don’t mind big projects and delayed gratification. I am ready. I am patient.” Except, you are not patient. Or, at least, I wasn’t. The quilt began with the earnest expectation that I would be finished by the time the cicadas began emerging in 2021. I am still not finished. It is June of 2021, and, by more realistic expectations, my cicada friends will be long gone before my cicada quilt finally reaches my bed.

But it didn’t take me very long to realize that finishing the quilt in record time had never been the true goal of my furious stitching. The fabric cicadas I cut lovingly from luscious fabrics, with a pair of sharp scissors that made a soft chirp that reminded me of the soft echo of a dying cicada song, emerged slowly from the soil of my imagination, finding their way into a rhythmic, patterned quilt top. It was meditative, and reflective. It was calming. I was working with the patience of cicada time, and the discipline sustained me through the volatile reality of American life in the wake of 2020.

As I approach the finishing stage of my paean to cicadas, I am wrapped in its warmth. In another seventeen years, I will be able to snuggle up next to my little red-eyed quilt critters and review how the world—and my world—has changed. I will remember all the pain, fear, kindness, and generosity of the years I pieced it together and learned to work in cicada time. And I will remember that each stitch, each cut, and each painstaking detail represents a little sliver of hope, joined together into a dazzling whole.

Cicadas do not live long after they emerge from their long sleep. The biological imperative to reproduce creates a frenzy that ends as quickly as it began, scattering the bodies of the spent cicadas on the earth to fertilize the next generation. May we live to see them resurrected, just as we, too, will be reborn into our new selves—the product of many tiny stitches of time patiently sewn together by the universe.