Seventeen Years in the Ground

I moved from Melbourne to Maryland in 2019 for my wife's job. Nobody warned me about Brood X.

In May, billions of cicadas came up out of the ground after seventeen years underground. They covered the trees, the fences, the cars. They left their crunchy brown shells on everything. And they sang, a loud, buzzing, whirring roar that started at sunrise and didn't stop all day.

My American neighbors were mostly annoyed. I was absolutely fascinated. Seventeen years! These insects had been underground since before my son was born, waiting for this exact spring.

My son and I became cicada scientists. We watched them crawl out of the soil at dusk and split their shells on the tree trunks, coming out soft and white with red eyes, then slowly turning black. We counted them. We drew them. He let one sit on his nose for a full minute.

By late June, they were gone, and the trees were quiet again. My son wrote a letter to the next brood, to be opened in 2038. He'll be twenty-four. He says he'll be waiting.