It will happen any day now. Zillions of them will crawl from their dirt bungalows, dust off their wings, slick back their hair and proceed to make us miserable with their obnoxious song. Cicada’s are Gods way of shaking his “no-no, you’ve been bad” finger at us.
In the 1950s, it seemed the little critters were everywhere in our Fort Worth neighborhood. Cats loved to eat them, dogs like to crunch them, and us kids captured them for fun. Tie a kite string on their leg and fly them around like a model airplane, and then blow them up with a Black Cat firecracker. Such fun. Nothing was quite as freaky as an angry Cicada buzzing in your hand.
One summer evening as the family sat in our back yard, drinking ice tea and listening to the buggy orchestra, I put my pet Cicada, “Little Buzzy,” down the back of my mothers shirt. No one in the family knew she was such an accomplished acrobat.
The educated experts say the insects appear in seventeen-year cycles, then die off and reappear seventeen years later. Who are these experts, and when did they start keeping track of the bugs appearances? What if a few miss the die-off, or stay too long in their hidey hole and mess up the entire show? That may explain why we heard them every summer in the 1950s; confused Cicada’s.
I’m looking forward to sitting on my patio, a nice tumbler of Irish whiskey in my paw, and listening to the sounds of my childhood.
Notes From The Cactus Patch 
I think the spring peepers are gonna be out up at our camp, too. We used to live full time off the grid until my dad got too ill to live alone. Now we have an upper MI home and a camp off the grid still. We are headed up there tomorrow. We are HOPING we are just ahead of the black flies and mosquitoes. I don’t totally hate black flies–you don’t feel when they bite you and they don’t buzz and above all, they do not come in the HOUSE and buzz. In June, up there, you’d think the mosquitoes were about to lift the house off the foundation. So we’ll need some bug spray. I also have to set up a fan in front of the door to blow the mosoquitoes away and then you tear in and out. We have a screened room. 🙂 I have bug zappers, but all this uses some juice, so we’ll need the generator a bit. the peeper frogs sound kind of nice. We also get some whipoorwhils that can be annoying all night. At first, you think, oh, a whipoorwhil–then after about three hours, you think, DAMN those whipoorwhils. 🙂
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I lived for a while in MN and the skeeters there are the size of birds. Summer, gotta love it.
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If you pay attention to their song, they will drive you insane. Be careful…
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I have yet to hear one here in the cactus patch, but I understand they are already heating it up in the south east. I know this 17 year thing is crap, I found two in my yard last summer. Either they were stragglers or lost.
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