That summer I saw 3 cicadas. The first with my love on a walk. He pointed it out, crushed on concrete by a dumpster near our house. The other two I held in my hands. I enclosed each of them in triangles made from natures debris. Wood, a feather, objects found on the ground beneath our feet. One flew away leaving an empty shape. I wondered what it was that gave her enough strength to fly away from her new linear home. She had been still in my palm, surely on her last legs. The third was dead, but intact, not crushed like the first. It remained where I lay it, on the grass for another to find.
Before that summer I had never seen a cicada, though they filled the sticky Mississauga nights of my childhood with a constant buzzing. The sound wasn't important to a girl with roller skates strapped to her feet and tangles in her long, auburn, hair. Construction, I thought. Chainsaws in the distance. Or crickets. But I knew I was wrong. Later when I was a lonely teen in the throws of puberty I saw a nature special on TV. University students were studying these strange creatures. Seventeen years of their life spent underground only to emerge with enough time to mate before their life cycle reached its final stage. Loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss in humans if held just outside the ear. How did this two inch, obstreperous insect, the only constant sound of my summers, remain unseen for 27 years of my life? I felt later, that finding 3 in one summer must have meant something. What did this natural dweller of the dark soil have to teach me?
1. Nothing in the cry
ReplyDeleteof cicadas suggests they
are about to die.
~ Matsuo Basho
2. In Japan, the cicada carries further philosophical connotations of re-birth. Since the cicada emerges from the ground to sing every summer, it is a symbol of reincarnation.
Of special importance is the fact that the cicada moults, leaving behind an empty shell. But furthermore, since the cicada only lives for the short period of time long enough to attract a mate with its song and complete the process of fertilization, they are seen as a symbol of evanescence.
3. In China, the phrase ‘to shed off the golden cicada skin’(金蝉脱壳) is the poetic name of the tactic of using deception to escape danger, specifically of using decoys (leaving the old shell) to fool enemies.