The Coming Invasion

Seventeen years have come and gone, and nature is ready to work her miracle. Sorry, all of you who live on the wrong side of the Mississippi River....you're not to be granted the pleasure. It's not personal, it's just a question of location and being in the wrong place when the invasion comes.

By this time next month, a large swath of the US will be inundated with very large insects and their very large red eyes. Every seventeen years it happens, with a regularity that the entomologists have yet to understand. In their hundreds and thousands, the white slimy creatures emerge from the earth, to attach themselves to anything vertical and molt with careless abandon. Under cover of darkness they crawl en masse, climbing onto trees and curbing, clinging, glistening in the lamp light.

And then the birds swoop. The dogs on walks pounce, feasting. Worried about what to feed the family pet? There's no melamine in cicadas, a high protein and high fat morsel of seventeen year old nutrition. Soon enough there'll be recipes provided in the local newspapers should a human being care to indulge. Deep fat fried, sauteed, pan roasted....with hollandaise perhaps?

If you're so unfortunate as to be cicada deprived, you can make your own. For a true effect, you'll want to make several hundred of them, but it's difficult to reproduce the experience of large heavy stupid insects flying into your head and trying to land on your body while you hold your glass of wine at the drinks party and hope that the host will herd everyone indoors before one of the feckin' bugs settles on your canape.

The cicadas emerge to have sex. That's all they do. No eating, no biting, just find a girl, settle down, raise a family, and then drop out of the trees, dead. The little ones will hatch, fall to the ground, burrow down and then grow for seventeen years, when the cycle repeats.

Where were you seventeen years ago? A child, ready to burst out of the school's doors and into the arms of summer? Where will you be in seventeen years time? An adult, perhaps, recalling the last invasion. Maybe you're a grandparent now, looking forward to sharing a wonder of nature with the little ones, and thinking that you may not be here for the next cycle of life and death.