This is a summer unlike most.
And certainly unlike any I can remember.
With each day, I think they must be gone—but, again the rhythmical chanting begins.
From high in the trees, or the grasses at my feet—they are everywhere.
Still.
Invaders from another world.
Fallen bodies litter the paths I walk.
They stumble, as in a drunken flight, bumping from one spot to the next. Orange wings clattering noisily along.
To leave a generation behind.
I wonder how this place will have changed in the 13 or 17 years before their young emerge from feeding below the earth.
And how large these small branches will have become.
And what the sky must feel like to something that has only known darkness.
(ovipositor behind last pair of legs)
“Mated females excavate a series of Y-shaped egg nests in living twigs and lay up to twenty eggs in each nest . A female may lay as many as 600 eggs. Six to ten weeks or so after oviposition, in midsummer, the eggs hatch and the new first-instar nymphs drop from the trees, burrow underground, locate a suitable rootlet for feeding, and begin their long 13- or 17-year development.”