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| Christine holds a 2013 cicada |
When the cicadas began emerging in our yard this spring, it came as no surprise. Julie and I lived in this same house in 1996, the last time Magicicada Brood II appeared in parts of New Jersey and other states along the Atlantic coast. And while the noise and the mess they make are a nuisance for sure, to me their reappearance after a long interval felt a bit like meeting an old acquaintance, or revisiting a place from my past.
It especially brought me back to one particular moment in 1996.
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| Christine, with her cousin Shanna, on Memorial Day 1996 - at the same spot where she first discovered a cicada that same spring. |
At that point we had lived in our New Jersey house for six years – and had not previously encountered these particular insects. I’m not even sure if we’d heard any advance reports that they were due to appear.
One weekend afternoon, my three-year-old daughter Christine and I were in the backyard, and I was clipping a bush or maybe pulling some weeds, when she came up behind me asking, “Daddy, what’s this?”
I turned around and she held up to my face this bizarre, creepy thing -- like an alien creature with two heads and multiple appendages. I had no idea what I was looking at.
If I recall correctly, my reply to my daughter’s question was: “GggyyyyAAAHHH!” But my shock didn’t faze her. She continued to hold the strange thing, examining it and watching it squirm around in her hand.
The thing, of course, was a cicada emerging from the brown shell in which it had crawled up into our yard from several feet below the ground. Soon there were zillions of them around our house and neighborhood, and of course we quickly learned about the life cycle of the periodical cicada. After six weeks or so they were gone, and quickly faded into memory.
This spring, news reports reminded us that they were coming around again, so we were ready when we started seeing cicadas here and there in late May. Still, we saw something this year that we must have missed last time.
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| The emergence, May 27, 2013 |
On Memorial Day, as we sat on our patio after burgers on the grill, I noticed Christine looking closely at the lawn and went over to see what she was looking at. It was quite a sight: The grass was crawling with brown-shelled cicadas that had suddenly emerged by the thousands.
As we watched, they moved across the yard toward the trees and fences around the edge, then crawled up the trunks and planks. There they started emerging from their shells – white, wormy things that soon fledged out into their black, winged adult form. Christine picked up various specimens to examine.
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| Andy and Shannon examine a Magicicada |
But this time, she was not a curious three-year-old. This time, she was a 20-year-old woman – still a big fan of nature and all creatures great and small – stepping gingerly, barefoot, across the grass to experience and study this phenomenon. This time, she was showing the critters to her boyfriend. And to her brother, not quite 17, who hadn’t been born the last time these insects came around, and his 17-year-old girlfriend, too young to remember them.
It was a scene guaranteed to make one acutely aware of the passage of time – of how much changes as the years go by and how much does not. Seventeen years ago, Christine and I discovered cicadas together in this same yard, behind this same house. At that time, Julie and I were expecting Andy. We’d been married about seven years; our family, our house, our life together still felt new. I had been married before, and my 18-year-old daughter, Marie, and 15-year-old son, Danny, lived an hour or so away.
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| Christine and Julie, Memorial Day 1996 |
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| Memorial Day 1996: Shanna, Danny, Brien, Marie, Kevin, Christine, Kevin |
That Memorial Day, we invited my parents, siblings, nieces and nephews to a little party in our backyard, along with Marie and Danny. I'm not sure if that was just before or just after the cicadas emerged that year; I don't remember them crashing our cookout that time.
A few weeks later, Marie graduated from high school. Not long after the cicadas born that summer began their 17-year stay underground, Andy was born. Soon, Marie and Danny moved with their mother to California.
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| Dan and Marie in California, 1999 |
Over the years since, Marie married Brian, moved a couple of times, gave birth to their son, Xander, moved a couple more times and settled in Virginia. Xander is now an astonishing six years old. Dan has remained in California, working and enjoying West Coast life.
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| Marie, Brian and Xander at home in Virginia |
Since 1996, Julie and I have each changed jobs a couple of times, watched our children grow and (hopefully helped them) mature into smart young adults. Christine is half-way through college and Andy is in the college-search phase as he enters his senior year of high school.
Things change; we grow older. I miss my dad, who died two and a half years ago, and my mom, who has faded into late-stage Alzheimer’s. We’re lucky to still have Julie’s parents, going strong in their 80s. Julie and I are doing our best to hold off the effects of age. I am, as people used to say, “pushing 60,” while she can still claim “mid-50s.”
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| Cicadas of 2013. Photo by Christine |
The cicadas that were born this summer will emerge in 2030. Where will any of us be then? At this stage, I can only hope to see one more emergence, and that assumes I live well into my 70s. The three-year-old cicada girl of 1996 and her younger brother will be 30-somethings, well into their lives, careers, possibly marriages, possibly parenthood. My older children will be middle-aged, and my grandson will be a young adult, probably already out of school and working. I can only hope they’ll all be healthy and happy.
Maybe Julie and I will still be in this same house; maybe we’ll be in some retirement community, or roaming the country in a motorhome. Maybe some other family will be watching the cicadas emerge from this backyard after a barbecue in late May, 2030.
If this house, this yard, this town, this world is still here and more or less the same. After all, a lot can happen in 17 years.
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