Grief is a Cicada

In the summer of 1999, we left New York City to visit my grandfather’s Long Island home. I was seven years old, and my grandfather was seven years away from death. Outside, the Brood V cicadas swarmed after seventeen long years underground.

Peeking over the back of the couch and through window screens, engorged on buttered rolls and charcuterie, my brother and I watched and listened to the whizzing cicadas. I loved their music, their size, their undeniable presence.

“Close the windows,” my grandmother said.

Hearing aids off, singing loudly, my grandfather ignored her. He was resolved to take us outside, to bring us closer to the miracle on this side of the East River.

He sang as we walked down the driveway and into the grass. The pine needles crunched below our feet. The air smelled like leaves. Around us, the cicadas sang their songs. My grandfather pinched something off a tree and held it out for me.

Within my hands, he placed, not a cicada, but her husk. With the sunlight streaming through the semi-translucent skin, it looked like a ghost. 

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I didn’t hear cicadas for more than two decades.

After my thirtieth birthday, I got hearing aids and made plans to hear everything, to never turn them down. At night, I sat with my husband and listened to frogs rumble, to bats chitter, to trucks on the highway honk. I faced away from the stove and waited for water to boil.

On a walk through the cemetery, I heard it. I was too far from Long Island, and it was too late in the season, too early by a decade for Brood V’s next emergence. But cicadas are never really gone. They remain under the surface, waiting to emerge. I heard it, and I knew what it was.

Neidy is a writer working in higher education administration. She has a Bachelor's in English from Siena College and a Master's in English from the University of Texas at Tyler. She lives in upstate New York with her spouse, two sons, their cat, and their dog.

Published April 15 2023