By Adrienne Garrison
@adrie.garrison

Most of fear is learned, they say, so I started in March by reading a handful of articles to cure myself of ignorance and terror. Take heart in these facts, Dear One: the Brood X cicada is not harmful, not to animals or plants! Sure, it may look like a creature from the underworld with its red-orange eyes, large steely body, and yellowish wings that it clicks together to make a sound louder than a lawnmower, but it won’t actually hurt you. 

I recited these facts in late April at a gathering of moms and they blinked back at me for a few moments before returning to their discussion of the last Brood X invasion, seventeen years ago.

“My mom told me she had to pull over the car once. They were so thick in the air she couldn’t even see where she was going.”

“I just remember the sickening sound of their bodies and shells crunching beneath my shoes whenever I walked outside.”

“Apparently it’s a really good year for birds and small mammals,” said another mom. “Unlimited food source.”

I nodded encouragingly toward my fellow rational thinker. We would not bestow this squeamishness to our children. We would do better. 

When the cicadas began to emerge, the kids and I went looking for them. In the backyard pine tree, my daughter spotted an amber shell clinging to a branch, radiant and golden in the sunlight. Her finger traced the limbs of the tree spotting one shed exoskeleton after another, dozens of them. In a moment of wonder she turned to me and said, “Mama, they’re like nature’s Christmas ornaments!”

Oh, the victory celebration I had in my own mind and heart at that moment. My children were so evolved.

A week later, we visited our favorite park. My nearly three-year-old son held one of my hands for balance as he walked across a low wall. He put one foot in front of the other, pausing every few paces to take a wide step over a live cicada, or lean into me for a moment as one of them began to move. 

“It’s okay, buddy. They’re just hanging out.” 

We decided to walk up the hill to another play area, passing under a large oak tree. The ground was littered with shells and dead cicadas and perforated with holes, like some kind of battle scene.

“Those are cicada holes,” my daughter said. “They lead to cicada nests.” Her voice was steady, but her grip on my hand got tighter. “They go all the way down through the earth and come out in China.” 

Wait, what? 

“No, honey, they only live about five feet underground. They come out when the ground temperature is…” 

But at this point we walked by a bench where a lone cicada had gotten stuck on its back and began to buzz in a circle, startling Penny into a panic. 

“Mama! Mmmmmama!!! Let’s go home, letsgohomerightnow!!!” 

I was unlatching the gate to the play area as she tried to climb up my other arm, her wide eyes locked on the idiot bug still clicking spasmodically on the bench. 

“Honey, that cicada won’t hurt you. We just got here. Let’s let Theo play a little while, and I’ll sit with you at the picnic table.” 

Any sudden movement had her trying to scramble more fully into my lap. She buried her face into my shoulder, pleading with me to take her home. Meanwhile, Theo was at the edge of a circle of young children, all watching an older girl gently lift a cicada off the play structure and lay it in the palm of her hand for their viewing pleasure. I watched my son glance at the bug, and then back to the other kids’ interested faces, clearly trying to understand this madness. 

Just days before, we’d only found evidence of the young cicadas lining a tree branch, but now they were out in full force, launching themselves into the air and—given the failure of their wings to account for the weight of their bodies—drunkenly dive-bombing their way onto the ground. With Penny shaking like a leaf on my lap, I repeated my mantra to myself as much as her.

“They won’t hurt you, darling.” 

Theo wanted to climb the playset, but there was a cicada on the fourth step that he couldn’t will himself around, so we gave up on the park. I opted to take the longer route back via the sidewalk, but the cicadas still whirred by our heads erratically, or crawled across the sidewalk ahead of us, or shuddered their wings as they lay dying. 

“Mommy!! Mommy hold me!” 
“No, hold ME!” 

I squeezed their hands tighter and said, “We’re almost to the car. You’re okay. It’s okay.” It was not okay. Their squeals reached a fever pitch until they were hanging off me, and I had to flex my arms to carry them like two terrified thirty-five-pound weights. I kept my eyes forward and my back straight, trying to project calm confidence, but quietly shaking with manic laughter at the absurdity of it all. Learned fear? What nonsense will parenting books convince me of next?!

The next week, we took our inaugural trip to the pool and the cicadas were there, too, floating in the water, clogging up the drains, washing up on the zero-depth entry, like flotsam. I’d given up the expectation of calm, detached interest at that point, but I was still pushing for not allowing them to ruin our fun. The kids looked for a bug-free path into the water and promptly freaked out the moment a bug came within a three-foot radius. I went alongside them, splashing cicadas aside, saying, “Don’t you feel sad for them? They can’t swim at all, so they’ll just drown here,” with a sort of cheerfulness, strangely delighted in the thought of so many of them meeting their end in this water. I splashed one of them close enough to the edge that it marched right out of the water and began pacing back and forth, its wings draped behind it like a cloak. I shivered, imagining its menacing gaze on me.

“Look, Mom!” Our attention was diverted to an older kid at the edge of the pool. “This one doesn’t have a head, but it’s still moving!”

I really hated them. “Let’s go where it’s deeper, kids. I don’t see as many over there.” And it was true. The kids bobbed around in their floaties, oblivious to the drowned cicadas swirling around my feet. I spun each of them like motorboats, pausing every few minutes to pat my neck, my hair, just certain something was crawling on me. When the lifeguards blew the whistle, we warily made our way to our chair where one cheeky bug was lounging on my towel. 

“Not to worry!” I said, walking a few steps away to shake it loose. I shook the towel toward the grass, and then again more vigorously, finally kicking at the towel to get the disgusting thing off. I smiled back at the kids, but they were standing on the pool chair watching two cicadas crawl closer and closer, their beady red eyes seemingly locked on the children. I definitely didn’t remember reading about that in the article. “Let’s… move over there and have a snack,” I said. 

We spent the break munching pretzels and watching a woman wade through the pool, cupping one water-logged cicada after another into her hand and tossing it into the air, where more often than not it took flight, landing a few feet away where it wandered back into the pool or whirred dizzily around until it flew into the waterfall feature and joined a floating horde of cicada bodies on the other side. 

She isn’t better than me, I thought, sipping my LaCroix. She isn’t saving anything. 

Leaving the pool, I stopped to pull my keys out of the front pocket of my backpack and was met with a violent snapping of wings. 

“WAHHHHHHHH!!” I screamed, jumping back and curling my fists. The kids scampered over to me, whimpering. 

“What?! What, Mama?”

“It’s in my bag,” I whispered, taking a few steps forward. I turned the whole thing over, tapping the pocket until a chastened cicada fell out. 

Articles say we have three more weeks of Brood X invasion in the Midwest, and then we can get on with our summer. When we’re on walks together, I calmly swat the devils off my children’s shirts and don’t begrudge my daughter for heading indoors to read on the couch after one too many creepy encounters. And when one lands on my back and I leap into the air, swinging my arms behind me in an attempt to get it off, my sweet children just laugh nervously, nodding their heads in solidarity. “Just remember, Mama,” they say without an ounce of conviction. “They won’t hurt you.” 

Photo by Joel Pontius.