THE CICADAS ARE COMING! THE CICADAS ARE COMING!
Discussing with my husband why I wanted to delay opening our pool this year with my curious teenager listening, I pled my case with the little information that I knew about the 17-year locust and the fact that this spring marks a year that they will emerge from the ground. I know they will come for a few weeks, be a bit of a nuisance and then be gone, so I just thought we should wait. I certainly don’t want to be out there swatting them away from me or the pool!
Well, I didn’t realize the impact this would have on my daughter until the other day.
Dealing with the typical mid-week exhaustion, I was running errands after work including some grocery shopping when I was walking through the aisles of our local Kroger store and my cell phone started ringing. Expecting to hear the latest request to be added to my shopping list, I was rather shocked to hear a crackling voice of terror on the other side of the phone from my 15-year-old daughter, Aleigha, because her personality is not anywhere near frantic. In fact, she is the calmest one of us all. It was just then that she managed to get the words out, “I don’t know what I just did or what I just clicked on…” At that moment when I realized she was not harmed, my immediate thought then went to WHAT DID SHE DO TO MY COMPUTER? Then she said, “These things are so scary. I am not going outside at all!”
Remember now, she is 15, so she has no idea what this 17-year phenomenon entails.
Yep. She looked up a cicada.
I agree with her 100 percent that these things are very scary to look at and the thought of them flying around and possibly landing on my head makes my stomach turn, but for the sake of the children, I know I must be strong, so I explained that they would only come for a few weeks and be gone.
That was not good enough. Nope. My Aleigha did some research and wanted to look for holes in our yard so we could spray those holes and the bugs would not have the opportunity to emerge from the ground. Again, being the strong one here, I suggested that perhaps because it snowed in April, that many won’t be able to even rise out of the ground and we may just have a mild case.
Not good enough either.
More research. Every noise she hears outside she thinks are the locust coming. I explain that she will know the noise when they arrive. It is a hum you just recognize.
Now as we are not so enthusiastically awaiting the arrival of the cicadas, we have gone over our calendar to develop strategies for how we will handle our outside events during this timeframe. Basically, we do not have a plan.
We can’t say for sure what this spring will bring or how long it will last, but as I explained to my daughter, I do not ever remember the locust being so bad that it made any particular impact on me, so hopefully this will come to pass quicker than not.
So, we haven’t opened the pool yet and we decided to go out west on vacation to run away for a little relief once they arrive. In the meantime, we will try to face them fearlessly, but I have a feeling you may hear a couple screaming girls here in the Valley in the very near future.
