The thing about the invasion of the 17-year cicadas is that everyone is remembering what they were doing and where they were 17 years ago, and for those of us old enough, 17 years before that! (I probably am old enough for even another leap back, but the place I was at that age didn't have a brood.) Hearing their racket is a bit like hearing a song on the radio that you haven't heard for 30-odd years and being suddenly transported to a room and a time and a version of yourself that you had more or less forgotten. An aural madeleine, as it were. Or a time machine.
The eras play in stereo.
On one channel a young aspiring actress writes a radio script that features green beans. Its cleverness and hilarity don't overshadow deep truths about family life. A colleague writes a script featuring monsters who live underground, coming up every 17 years to menace and terrorize the world's inhabitants.
On another channel, a weary mother tries to relax on the porch, happy that the children have graduated from abject terror about the invading hordes to catching them and showing off how they know which gender they hold. The mother would like nothing more than to read a book on the screen porch under the trees, but the sound is so deafening that she must take refuge in the relative quiet of the house. The house has another kind of noise: people, children, more people talking talking talking. She is likely having a nervous breakdown, but is quite unable to decompensate, so no one really knows. One night she and the children go out with flashlights and watch the cicadas march out of their holes in an unending parade, one after the other.
On another channel, there is almost no noise except for that from the ambient electronics. The environment is falling apart. The pollinators are in danger. People don't talk to each other anymore. Instead, they stare at screens, work on screens, get their news from screens, make art on screens, write on screens, send each other messages on screens. Some of those messages are about the insects emerging by the millions from the ground. How do they know when 17 years is up, anyway?
Of course, on the main channel we've got the cicadas, who are probably quite lucky. They probably don't worry about the environment or the pollinators or the children's fears or the mothers' wearinesses or the swollen heads of the budding artists. I wonder if they even remember their underground lives when they fly around singing for their mates .
