summer insects: a triptych
I. In the Grass Live the Cicadas
The year I couldn’t make the double cicada brood event I told them I’d be there in spirit. I heard that their bodies blanketed the ground creating tree skirts around the oaks. I heard that their voices crescendoed into an announcement of their return. We are here! Alive! The grass was there to welcome them.
Growing up, cicada choirs were the soundtrack of summers in St. Louis. I came to life during this time: hearing their calls, the humidity's embrace, the sun hanging on a little harder before it collapsed for the day. Summer had birthed me in the year of the tiger – fiery and determined – and its arrival brought me back to the earth every year.
Virtuosos of transformation, they teach us it’s okay to take our time becoming. Years, even, if we need. They hang out underground until what we call their adulthood, breaking through in droves, a strategy that developed to protect against predators. While underground, they dig tunnels while feasting on plant roots and developing the violin bellies that will become their song. Going dark and returning en masse, cicadas call to me: find your people; there is power in numbers; stay underground and rest, prepare, and when you’re ready, rise up. A study in communal movements.
Every summer I’m inspired by their shedding of former selves. Leaving the discarded exoskeletons as artifacts of their metamorphosis. It’s the time of year I too emerge in my newness. I picture a bowl holding the crispy shells of all the “me’s” that have come before. It’s useful, after all, to pick them up from time to time and remember where I’ve been.
II. I like to think the cicadas and lightning bugs are friends
and they perform together. What a show they put on. The music and the lights. The dance. The strobe of the lightning bug and the harmony of the cicadas. While underground as kids, they have sleepovers and bring their fare for snacks. The cicadas bring their tree root sap, and the lightning bugs bring their snails and slugs.
While kids underground, the cicadas are quieter, more reserved. More likely to be alone. Introverts (surprising to know them as adults!). The lightning bugs show up in packs, keep the cicadas up late laughing and whooping and romping about. Lightning bug larva tell stories under the soft glow of their flashing bodies to keep the cicadas entertained.
They bond together over their lives mostly spent growing. Over their short time above ground as adults with one shared goal: to find a mate. How boring it sounds to them as kids, cozied in under the world, tunneling and dreaming.
Once they emerge from the earth, they part ways, pulled by the magnetism of their purpose. In their few remaining weeks alive, they might run into one another. Cross paths and give a brief acknowledgement of each other. As their bodies fill up with the memory of that time spent together as kids before everyone forgot themselves.
III. I Call Them Lightning Bugs
We all had different approaches to catching them. My brother’s trick was to hold the jar in the air to make it seem like it was floating, like it was part of the sky.
“They don’t even notice!” he’d say. “Fly right in.”
He’d stand statuesque. And if your eyes had adjusted to the dark, you could watch just his chest rise and fall as his arm hung motionless holding up the jar. And if your eyes hadn’t adjusted, you could run right into him. He was so good at stillness.
My sister’s tactic was mimicry. She approached the lightning bugs with a flashlight, turning it on and off in an attempt to copy their light patterns. She’d run up to a cluster flashing her lightbeam and calling for us to come with the jar when she sensed they were lingering. Sometimes we didn’t listen, but she always kept calling.
“You guys, I’ve got some, hurry!” beckoning from across the lot. She corralled, we collected. When we’d get to her, she’d be standing there jarless, just holding her wrangling flashlight.
I was consumed by the varying patterns. A sporadic swirl – the “loop-de-loop” – with light that appeared at random. Or the “Houdini”: flowing bundles of light and then vanishing. And the “zigzag” path of peaks and valleys where the light would glow only on the crescendos. Each one acted as a code to attract the right mate.
After we captured a few, we'd stare at the flashing bodies, pressing the glass to our faces, the magic of the chartreuse glows. I could see their reflections in my brother’s and sister’s eyes. We'd sit in the open sandlot beside our house. We'd stretch our summer legs – covered in bruises and cuts and scrapes – into the grass and grow itchy, slapping at mosquitoes and only moving to dodge June bugs, worried those sticky beetles would get caught in our hair. We'd let our humid, sticky bodies sit side-by-side, the jar nearby sporadically glowing. Before long, one of us would twist the lid, usher the lightning bugs with a soft “go” before leaning back down and remaining splayed out in the lot. Silent bodies and busy minds soaking up the fleeting freedom of those cicada choir summer nights.
Most of a lightning bug’s life is spent underground – years – young and maturing, preparing for their brief moment in the air – just a few weeks – when they'll try to breed before their sudden deaths. While young and underground they remain with their siblings working together to capture food (often three times their size!) to survive.
Once they emerge, though, I wonder if they long for the ground. If they miss working together to take down a snail. I read that after they become grown, if their environment isn’t enough to destroy them, they’re capable of eating each other if held captive together in a glass jar.
