Cicadas and the Sun
Marion Winik
Word Count 409
At first I could not understand why everyone was so excited about the cicadas. They're coming, they're coming, wait for it, they're coming — then suddenly the ground was riddled with bullet holes and the air filled with insect sirens. Out crawled the nymphs who stuck themselves to the foliage shoulder to shoulder, much the way the cockroaches used to coat the counters and floors of the houses we rented in Austin during the late 70s, only the cicadas do not run when you slam the door and turn on the lights. Instead, they wildly shrill their unceasing raucous chorus, an aural carpet-bomb of car alarms and can openers.
Are they really so much better than any other big, greasy-looking bug?
But perhaps the thing people loved so much about the cicadas was that they came at all. After everything we have done to our poor planet and the species we share it with, after a year when every streak was broken, every cycle interrupted, beloved annual observances and holidays canceled right and left, after a year that took the work out of clockwork and put it on unemployment, after the word pandemic became pandemic and no more dystopian than home appliances that spy on you and tell your secrets to scheming capitalists, after that and more — the cicadas, bless their hearts, came as scheduled. More stimulating than any stimulus package, they came with a message. You haven't ruined everything.
The comfort the cicadas brought with them, like every other earthly cycle, has its origin in the circling of the sun. We worship sunrise and sunset not only for their beauty but for their certainty and their centrality. Every other thing we care about depends on this. Every notion of endurance, of optimism, of renewal. The beginning and end with no beginning or end, amen.
Circles and cycles aside, a life is a line. A line segment, in fact, with a beginning and an end. If anyone knows this, it's the cicadas, whose time above ground is so very short. At the very start of his line is my baby grandson, born in the waning days of the pandemic, already smiling and babbling and taking his first steps. He will be seventeen when the cicadas return. If I am here to see it with him, I will not wonder why everyone is so excited. I will welcome the darling creatures with the enthusiasm they deserve.
Marion is the author of First Comes Love, The Big Book of the Dead and many other books. Her award-winning column appears monthly at Baltimore Fishbowl and her essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and elsewhere. A board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she reviews for People, Newsday, The Washington Post, and Kirkus Reviews; she hosts The Weekly Reader podcast at WYPR. More info at marionwinik.com.