The seventeen-year cicada

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This is the seventeenth year of the seventeen-year cicada cycle.

If you live in the Northeast, and you’re in your mid-twenties or older, you’ll understand what that means.

Cicadas are huge brown-golden insects, and they buzz like power tools (up to eighty or ninety decibels). Then they die, and their huge bodies lie on the lawns and sidewalks wherever you look, and the birds and skunks and possums gobble them up.

But, before they die, they breed up in the trees, and their eggs and larvae drop to the ground, and the larvae burrow deeper and deeper, and we won’t see them for another seventeen years.

I remember the summer of 1996. It was very annoying. Cicadas are astonishingly noisy; 80/90 decibels is a lot of volume, and they produce it on a high screeching frequency that reminds you of a horror-movie sound effect. Don’t worry: if you live on the Eastern Seaboard, you’ll be hearing it soon enough.

So: the 2013 cicadas will mate, and they’ll lay their eggs up in the trees where they’re singing. When the eggs hatch, the newborn nymphs will drop to the ground and burrow, deeper and deeper, feeding on the roots of plants.

And the whole cycle will begin again in 2030.

How old will I be then? Let me see: in 2030. I’ll be 72, if I’m still alive.

And hopefully I’ll be deaf as a post.

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Cabbage butterflies

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I like butterflies, especially the big 747 models with snazzy colors, like the monarchs and the swallowtails. But I also have a nice feeling about the simple dull colorless ones; they give a pleasant fluttery feeling to the day when you see them, and they seem pretty harmless. (As Bart Simpson once said: “No one ever suspects the butterfly.”)

 

 

For example: now and then I see cabbage butterflies, AKA cabbage moths, AKA Pieris rapae. You know them: the white ones that swirl and dart through the garden like animated dinner napkins.

 

 

My parents used to grow basketball-sized cabbages, and the cabbage butterflies loved them. They don’t eat them, you see; they lay their eggs in them. Then their children (green oozy-looking caterpillars) eat the cabbage.

 

 

My mother hated those caterpillars. She had a giant salt-shaker of some infernal pesticide, which she used on the cabbages the way you’d sprinkle Parmesan on your spaghetti. It certainly didn’t kill all the caterpillars, and I marvel that it didn’t kill all of us. (One of our neighbors saw her strewing poison on her cabbages once, and wrote a letter to the local paper about “my neighbor lady who sprinkles poison on her vegetables.” He also said something like “I’d rather eat a bug once in a while than poison my own food.”)

 

 

(We thought he was crazy. Forty-five years later, I see that he was ahead of his time.)

 

 

Mom’s poison didn’t seem to reduce the population of cabbage butterflies, as I recall. And what’s a summer day, after all, without a few cabbage butterflies wheeling and pirouetting in the sunlight? 

 

 

I suspect that, if I’d been born a butterfly, I’d have been a cabbage butterfly: not extraordinarily beautiful, but with my own quiet charm.

 

 

And I do like cabbage once in a while.

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