Music
A lot of people say a lot of things about the beauty of birdsong, with me usually first among them. The Montezuma's oripendulas which served as our alarm clock in Belize were surreal, the meadowlarks of the plains of Idaho were worthy or orchestration, the robins and morning doves of suburban Maryland make me think of home, and even the francolins who jarred me awake at four in the morning at Mokolodi were fun and exotic. However beautiful the symphonic sound of a skein of geese above my head, passing by as I drift off to sleep, and however exhilarating the raucous dance music of 10,000 cranes calling all around my morning cup of coffee, it is not the birds who I want to write the sound track to my life.
It's the cicadas!
I enjoy the chirping of crickets in the evening, and the katydids will serenade you all night long in some places, but there is nothing that makes me feel at home like the alien roar of the Cicadoidea. It reminds me of dinners on the deck, picking "flavor granules" (flowers from the black gum tree) out of Dad's grilled chicken, and Saturday mornings spent at swim meets eating donuts (or bagels once our coach told Mom donuts weren't very good pre-race food). Playing in the yard with Karen and finding shed cicada skins which stick to your clothing like broaches; "cicada-skin pins," it falls trippingly off the tongue. Here in Maryland we get cicadas ever summer, they spend three years in the ground, then one brilliant summer in the trees before they mate and die. The real concert, however, comes once ever 17 years, when a bumper crop of cicadas all emerge at once, in early summer, and take over suburbia with a gentle invasion. Shed skins cover ever tree trunk, crushed bugs coat the sidewalks and the shoes of passers-by, and their song is deafening. It is a strange song, different from the normal summer chorus, and strangely reminiscent of a 1950s UFO (this because they used cicadas for the sound of a UFO in one popular 1950s sci fi movie).
The last time they came out was my senior year of high school. For a few weeks before they emerged, the news anchors were all having fun getting people worked up about them. "Watch out! The cicadas are coming!" Not that they did any harm, at worst they would mess up your windshield. The really remarkable thing about the work up to their emergence happened in my physics class. The boy who would go on to become validictorian of our class says "Everyone is talking about these cicadas? What's a cicada?" He had never noticed their peaceful roar, never thought to wonder who was singing from the trees. I guess there just aren't enough poems about cicadas. We all know bird song, but if someone can live in Maryland their entire life and not know what a cicada is, then cicadas need more press.
It's the cicadas!
I enjoy the chirping of crickets in the evening, and the katydids will serenade you all night long in some places, but there is nothing that makes me feel at home like the alien roar of the Cicadoidea. It reminds me of dinners on the deck, picking "flavor granules" (flowers from the black gum tree) out of Dad's grilled chicken, and Saturday mornings spent at swim meets eating donuts (or bagels once our coach told Mom donuts weren't very good pre-race food). Playing in the yard with Karen and finding shed cicada skins which stick to your clothing like broaches; "cicada-skin pins," it falls trippingly off the tongue. Here in Maryland we get cicadas ever summer, they spend three years in the ground, then one brilliant summer in the trees before they mate and die. The real concert, however, comes once ever 17 years, when a bumper crop of cicadas all emerge at once, in early summer, and take over suburbia with a gentle invasion. Shed skins cover ever tree trunk, crushed bugs coat the sidewalks and the shoes of passers-by, and their song is deafening. It is a strange song, different from the normal summer chorus, and strangely reminiscent of a 1950s UFO (this because they used cicadas for the sound of a UFO in one popular 1950s sci fi movie).
The last time they came out was my senior year of high school. For a few weeks before they emerged, the news anchors were all having fun getting people worked up about them. "Watch out! The cicadas are coming!" Not that they did any harm, at worst they would mess up your windshield. The really remarkable thing about the work up to their emergence happened in my physics class. The boy who would go on to become validictorian of our class says "Everyone is talking about these cicadas? What's a cicada?" He had never noticed their peaceful roar, never thought to wonder who was singing from the trees. I guess there just aren't enough poems about cicadas. We all know bird song, but if someone can live in Maryland their entire life and not know what a cicada is, then cicadas need more press.