They’ve been plastered in the news lately. Every day, there is some mention about the impending return of the Cicadas. I tried to think back to the last time they came around, and to be honest, I don’t remember one way or the other. If you do the 17-year math, it would be 2004.
By that time, I had been a newly appointed “country girl,” having made the move from the city some 14 years earlier. It took me that long to acclimate. But. I guess by that point, the culture shock had made an indelible mark on me, and a few cicadas were just “another thing.”
If, they have in fact, come forward every 17 years, they came along like this during the past two centuries.
2021
2004
1987
1970
1953
1936
1919
1902
I, for one, am not too concerned. After living in Charleston, with a steady flow of Palmetto bugs, a little cicada seems impish, at best.
I was also thinking that I am glad I’m not a cicada. Maybe they love their lives, for oh, how they sing. Like jackhammers. But. They stay below ground for years and years, burrowing and sucking loads of root juice. Then, when they get their big debut on the top side of things, they only last four weeks. Looking for love. Then. Pregnant. Then. Dead.
Blech.
As I’ve said so many times before here, a great daily practice is to acknowledge our life force and give thanks for the good fortune in our lives.
I am thankful I am not a cicada.
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“Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: It must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.”
—William Faulkner
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“A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all the other virtues.”
—Cicero
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“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
—G.K. Chesterton
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Do these things bug you? Or.
