And they're not just big and ugly. They, as I mentioned a moment
ago, fly. Big, ugly critters were not meant to fly. Birds were
meant to fly. Birds are beautiful. They flutter, take wing, soar.
Locusts, cicadas - whatever - lunge.
They heave their lumbering, ugly selves smack into the side of your
face. They bound into your hair. And, in the driveway, the
sidewalk, the front lawn, wherever, you do the dance of a thousand
Euw-Euw-EUWs.
This is to be a plague of cicadas every bit as plaguish as that of
locusts. It comes every 17 years, they say. Something to do with
the cycle of the World Series hopes of
Boston Red Sox fans.
The good thing is that we won't have to pay to go to the movies.
We'll have our very own summer horror blockbuster every time we
open our doors.
When I lived in
Texas, I would go to sleep to the lulling croak of
cicadas. Some folks didn't care for it. But I liked their gravelly
drone. It was, to me, what police sirens are to New Yorkers. A sort
of lullaby.
But that was at night, when I couldn't see them. And it was only a
few hundred or so. Not billions covering twice the size of small
countries. I wasn't up to my ears in them, wading through the
critters as if through a field of wheat.
As I'm writing before the advent of the cicada invasion, I don't
know how I'll react when all this happens. I assumed I would squish
them. But I only have two feet. Fortunately, it turns out that I
can also eat them.
Along with a variety of other insects and bugs, cicadas are all the
culinary rage, according, again, to
The Washington Post. The paper
says that at least one person, a Frenchman-turned-American, gathers
cicadas and serves them as fresh as possible, some plain, others
sautéed, to his guests. Of course, the French are the same folks
who convinced the world that snails are prized meat.