Love Song for the Cicada
This essay won the Robert Ruark Award for non-fiction writing about the natural world.
The abdomen of the male cicada is hollow, used to resonate the sound of his wanting through the thickness of the Southern forest. His sound reaches between the dogwoods, the magnolias, the drapings of Spanish moss on the low-hanging branches of old oak. They sing the most on hot summer days, fueled by the sun and punctuating the dusk with mating calls.
The summer I came back from my first year at school, the North Carolina sun beat down relentlessly.
I worked outside at my mom’s garden center, spending the long stretch of each afternoon in a lawn chair, moving with the shade as the sun crossed the sky. The lone fan turned above me, rotating slowly like a vinyl record. Sweat clung to my upper lip no matter how many times I licked it away. All those days blur together now like sunburnt fever dreams.
I worked when Mom couldn’t — which was often — so it was just me and my chair and the stifling heat. When we got customers — which was not often — I would stand around looking busy while they stepped across the tiny cobblestone path and admired our collection of Mexican metal art. Part of me hoped they wouldn’t buy anything because I had yet to figure out the pre-Y2K card reader. Eventually, they would move on to the barcade or the pizzeria down the street, and I would take my book out of its hiding spot under the register. There wasn’t much to do in between the lone wanderers except read and listen to trucks rumble across the overpass.
When the heat got too much for me, I watered the flowers. At first, the hose pumped out hot water that had been sitting out all day inside its plastic coils, but then it started to run cold. Once I made sure each plant had enough to last through the evening, I would shower my shins and toes. I never wore shoes while I was working, and neither did Mom.
I had never been able to withstand the heat. My thin, lanky body was born in the swamp of Charleston and raised in the thick humidity of the Carolina foothills, but I never learned to adapt. Every summer I sweat through my tank tops and stuck my head in the freezer when no one was looking. Mom, who grew up in Florida, looked at me like I was some frail, sickly changeling that had been switched out for her Southern baby.
When I moved to New York for college, I thought I was finally escaping the swelter. But as soon as I stepped out of my mom’s car, double parked on 14th Street, I quickly realized that the concrete sidewalks trap the heat of the day long after the sun dips below the skyscrapers. My roommates were all from out West (L.A., San Diego, Albuquerque), so they were accustomed to the late summer air, and in the winter they kept the dorm at a toasty 75 degrees. I started to miss the loud, humid summer nights back home when the cicadas and crickets harped at each other in a dissonant call and response.
I watched the moon wax and wane sixteen times in the city before the South started calling for me again. The city taught me a lot in sixteen months. I learned the subway map by heart. I learned how to tell the different siren sounds apart, police from fire from ambulance. I learned you have a leave a place to know you belong there, and I belonged back home. When I left, my suitcase was too small to fit all the things I had lived with, so I had to leave a box on the street for strangers to pick apart. It was December and the snow had just started to fall, dusting the cardboard in white. I wondered often in those first few weeks if it was buried under a pile of snow; if it would turn up in the Spring when the ice started to melt.
The cicada is one of the loudest insects, their calls reaching up to 120 decibels. If you were to listen up close with your ear by its vibrating tymbal you could go deaf from the noise. They call out for a mate into the open sky, on the chance that another of their kind could be enchanted by it.
Of course, the nuances of their songs are indistinguishable to the human ear. But still, there is something so human about calling out in desperation, hoping someone will hear you. There is something so Southern about desiring someone loud enough for the whole sky to hear you.
I fell in love with a man watching a meteor shower from lawn chairs on a dock, way out in the farmland of rural Virginia. My arms itched from the bugs and the grass and the scratch of his beard but the cool air over the lake soothed them. Frogs croaked on the shore. Water striders made tears in the dark surface. The trees in the distance moved like they were breathing.
We spent the night in a nylon tent, nothing over our bodies but a thin sheet. Still, we woke up damp and flushed red. The dew on the long grass wet our ankles. Steam rose over the water while fog hovered just above the treetops. It was easy to feel the joy of my body and his body when we were right where they were meant to be.
Young cicadas are called nymphs. They spend their childhoods eight feet below the ground, surrounded by the cool, damp earth for over a decade before emerging.
In the Greek myths, nymphs were divine spirits that appeared as young maidens. They lived in the forests, the mountains, the rivers, the oceans. Most of them stayed in one place, inhabiting a particular natural dwelling, taking the form of water or slipping into the trunk of a tree. Humans could sometimes catch them dancing or singing, washing in the river or basking in the soft glow of dappled sunlight. Their songs entranced the mortals, much like the sirens.
I imagine to their mates, the call of the cicadas sounds much like their ancient namesakes, blissful and ardent. As I grew further and further away from my home, they began to sound that way to me; loud and familiar like the reliable chime of a grandfather clock. I began to crave the heat, the sweat on the back of my neck, the smell of pine, the taste of smoke on my tongue from a campfire burning in the forest. I had never felt suited to the muggy, mosquito-filled summers of my birthplace, but it found me anyway.
Many people move to the city from far away and are unaccustomed to its deafening sound, but I was prepared. The night always reverberated with the cicadas’ calls back home. Southern silence is full, loud. It takes up space. I learned so much from those hot summer nights, lying on my back in the grass, listening intently to that pulsing, dissonant quiet.