Editor’s note: By the time you read this, our mass emergence of spring cicadas may have already come and gone. The boisterous phenomenon lasts only a month or so, and there’s no telling when they’ll emerge or even how many there may be. As conspicuous as they are, periodical cicadas are mysterious creatures – which is part of what makes them indefinitely interesting.
Seventeen years ago, a female cicada climbed a hickory tree in Ocoee, Tennessee. Using the knife-like appendage attached to her abdomen, she made cuts in the underside of branches and filled them with eggs, hundreds and hundreds of them.
Six weeks later, her squirmy nymphs hatched, alongside millions of others in nearby trees. Collectively, they dropped to the soil and began to burrow in search of roots, their food source.
While that was happening, I was 20 years old. It was 2004. Myspace was just getting started. Smartphones didn’t exist. Even texting wasn’t a thing yet.
I was studying business at a community college just outside my hometown of Versailles, Kentucky, a major I’d chosen after an advisor told me that creative writing wasn’t a practical career path. I would go on to graduate with a marketing degree, and over the following years I would work various jobs – housekeeper; ESL instructor; legal assistant.