Lifecycles

North East, Maryland | 1987 | 3 years old | Mother

I remember standing barefoot and shirtless, crying on a screened-in porch. Summertime. 

I don’t remember the argument between Mom and Dad. 

I remember Mom getting in a red Ford Taurus and Dad throwing a rolled-up newspaper at the back of her car as it sped off. She had an affair. Maybe it was the first. It was not the last. I’m not sure how long she was gone. Maybe weeks. Maybe months. It didn’t matter. Dad took good care of me. 

I don’t remember my first experience with the emergence of the Brood X periodical cicadas. They come out every seventeen years to eat, reproduce, and return to the earth. Not all of them make it. Cicadas are clumsy fliers making them susceptible to predators. Their strategy is strength in numbers.

The emerging cicadas formed a biological storm of chaos in the background that mirrored the family turmoil that was my whole world. 

Like the cicadas, Mom had a rhythm to her appearances and disappearances. 

North East, Maryland | 2004 | 20 years old | Grandmother 

A half-brother was in federal prison. Mom was long gone. My grandmother was my mom in every sense of the word. I called her “Maw.” I spent Fridays with Maw all through childhood. I went to her house most evenings during my high school years. We went out to dinner together every Tuesday night at a restaurant halfway between my hometown and the university town where I lived and attended classes. It’s not hard to guess why I spent so much time with her, talking and watching Star Trek reruns. 

I remember standing by the dogwood tree in the front yard of Maw’s brick house up on the hill. Billions of cicadas bored holes from deep underground and broke through the surface. Their black bulbous bodies buzzed about and swarmed every available surface. Their translucent wings spiderwebbed with a pop of red-orange with eyes and legs of a similar hue. Their high-pitched buzzing, whining whir, and clicking an assault on ear drums. Their bodies blanketed trees, the ground, car windshields, and windowsills. Their empty, shedded shells crushed and crunched underfoot. 

It felt like an apocalyptic representation of the transition between adolescence and young adulthood. 

Overactive. Overload. Overwhelm. 

Corvallis, Oregon & North East, Maryland | 2021 | 37 years old | Father 

I lived in Oregon. Periodical cicadas do not habitat here. 

Dad remarried several years ago. A stepfamily that I love dearly. Mom remarried again. Mom and Dad have a combined eight marriages between them and other people.  

I still don’t talk to Mom. She popped up over the years like the cicadas. Just long enough to make her presence known. An inconvenience. A flurry of activity yet lacking a lasting legacy.

My wife, the love of my life, was pregnant with our daughter. Fatherhood on the precipice. My dad was sick with cancer for the second time (he got better). 

I went to Maryland to visit before our baby was born. I just missed the cicadas. I wanted to feel them. Let them crawl over my bare skin, their legs entangled in my arm and leg hair, and think of Maw. 

Maw died three years ago at 84 years old. She made it to our wedding where we all danced the Hokey Pokey together. I couldn’t have asked for much more time. But of course I wanted more. Despite our talking on the phone every couple of weeks, no voice messages remained on my cell phone. I still look for those phantom messages every few months, just in case I missed one. Years later, the grief still comes in waves like the cicadas. Dormant for a while, then all-consuming. 

??? | 2038 | 54 years old | Daughter 

Our daughter will be 17 years old. I’m not sure how we are supposed to let her go, but I know we must. We hope she will come home often. Maybe we will take one last family vacation to Maryland to see the cicadas. But who will be left to visit? 

??? | 2055 | 71 years old | Family 

Hopefully these remaining years are spent with my wife and daughter until we depart the earth one by one and are placed in the ground, where the cicadas dwell. 

Maybe I’ll get to see the cicadas one last time before I join Maw. Although I don’t really believe I will see her again, not really. Death to dirt to dust. But it makes me feel better thinking that I might be able to tell her about everything she missed. 

Who knows, maybe I will. 

Family— that's what it's all about.