Cicada Summer

May is the hardest month for the golf shop: the college help wants to sleep in (or play golf) and the high school help is not out of school. Thus, I am on the sales floor more hours than I want to be, with little energy to work on the blog or website when I get home.

That should end after this weekend.

What won't end this Memorial Day weekend is the 17 year cicada arrival. I knew it was coming, even as it dawned on me that all those trees and shrubs I planted last fall were “sitting ducks” for the onslaught of these bugs. I spent a whole day this week covering the woody plants with netting as I watched cicadas suddenly appear nearby, whir off branches or even land on me.

I was pregnant with my second son, Jonah, the last time these creatures emerged. That was my first experience of this phenomenon and I couldn't believe it. I remember holding the phone receiver out the back door so that my friends in Ohio could hear the deafening buzz saw of cicada love calls. They were everywhere! When it was over (just before Jonah's birth) I told Charlie we'd have to live here at least another 17 years so I could experience this again.

Well, here we are, 17 years later and the cicadas have arrived. It will be a couple of weeks before you can't hear yourself talk when you go outside. The golf courses nearby, Ridge County Club, Beverly Country Club and Evergreen Golf Club, will be covered with cicadas by that time. I heard one of the members recall how hard it was to play a round in the racket produced by cicadas, lake gulls screaming overhead (they are as bad as the bugs) and other birds whose presence is multiplied by the mass of insects on every tree.

It's really something. Nature at her most pointless extreme. An event that can only be witnessed where old trees exist, where land has been left alone, undeveloped, unfarmed and unpaved. Right here in Beverly Hills/Morgn Park, IL.