It's a Wonderful Second Life

I Can Hear the Cicadas

Do you know what a cicada is? For a very brief time in my life, my mother moved my sister and I to Oklahoma where I first experienced the lazy summertime hum of cicadas, only we called them jar flies. Mostly because as children we liked to capture the docile bugs and put them in jars and keep them as very part-time pets. Jar flies sort of fascinated me because they were both ugly and adorable at the same time. What's also unique about them is that they shed their exoskeletons and leave behind perfect replicas of themselves which we loved to find in tree limbs and hold/examine them.

They have a very distinct sound that they make. It's a loud chorus of humming and the sound seems to just go along with the summertime heat. You know you're in late summer when the long days finally give over into evening and the sun goes down with the drowning choir of cicadas. I was reminded of this as I walked along Hazardous.