Magicicada
Outliers from Brood XIX of the 13-year cicadas have been calling from the edge of the woods this week. I look for them on tree trunks at 5:30 a.m. and midnight, but so far I have found only their shells, five so far, all on the railing of the old front deck.
We have been living at the edge of this spring’s phenomena: the April 8 solar eclipse at 90 percent magnitude; the northern lights on May 10 and 11 showing up here faintly, mostly in photographs; and now this remnant cicada group appearing, beyond the edge of its defined range, in a year when two specific broods emerge together east of here for the first time in 221 years.
The genus Magicicada, the periodical cicadas, includes 23 broods and eight species. Some emerge every 13 years, and some every 17 years. Brood IV, the Kansan Brood, a 13-year group made up of three species, last came above ground here in 2015. That spring we were looking for a place outside of town. The cicadas clustered everywhere, small, red-eyed beauties with orange-veined wings. We found what seemed like a good spot of land and later built a fine house, but the place was wrong, and the house too much, and we realized we had invested lot of time into a mistake when we were old enough to know better, and we did not want to make another mistake.
It was a lonely five years, looking for the right place, made lonelier by the pandemic and its after-effects, but last fall this cabin in the hills north of town came open, and now I can sit at home on a Saturday afternoon with a calm heart and listen to cicadas I wasn’t expecting.
They come regularly, so their emergence becomes a marker of time. Before 2015, Brood IV was out in 2002, and at a house down this lane, I met three other women for yoga on Saturdays. In fair weather we would go out onto the deck, and that spring I lay in savasana watching cicadas in the air and dozing, not wishing I could live here someday.
Probably I was thinking about what I wished I’d done differently. I am the kind of person who reviews my past decisions obsessively and in sequence, trying to make sense of what seemed each next right step, trying to find the logic that makes it possible to avoid regret. I also get distracted by coincidences and secretly indulge in some degree of magical or metaphysical or symbolic thinking around what has happened—such as cicada emergences marking both the beginning and closure of a bad move. Or the restoration of balance in a solar eclipse (darkness in daytime) followed by the appearance of the aurora borealis (light in darkness).
We will see the Brood IV again in 2028, a year for which I have been making plans that have nothing to do with cicadas.
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It is possible that this group is, in fact, from the Kansan Brood. Probably not, but maybe. If I could find one, I could identify it and better guess the brood. Sometimes a smaller group emerges four years (or one year) early or late depending on food supply and weather conditions. Like them, I adapt—or don’t—making a change based on certain signals.
Because their lives in their adult form are so brief, it is easy to think of periodical cicadas as not being there. And yet they have been living under the porch all this time, a couple of feet down, sucking on tree roots, probably from a nearby oak. That’s what it felt like for me, for a couple of years.
But about that genus name, Magicicada. It really does mean what it sounds like, “magician cicada,” the one that disappears then comes back later. Which is what I have done, not through magic but through bearing down and waiting.