The cicadas are coming this year! Several news articles today using words like 'pest.' 'plague,' and 'earplugs.' Decent explanation of essential harmlessness and weird life cycle. There are several groups, offset, so they do seem to come more often than every 17 years.

I remember finding the carapaces halfway up trees, as a kid, translucent, beautiful, alien. By the time my son was small we had a really good microscope. Up that close they are just astonishing. The legs especially have fearsome looking spines for climbing trees. We talked about what it would feel like to climb out of the ground, up, up through the warm soft earth, never having seen the sun, not knowing what was up there. How brave. And what it would feel like to take off your skin which had gotten all tight and itchy and just wrong, and have a fancy new self underneath-- with wings!

Here is a link which I hope works. It suggests eating them. I never did that! Says they taste like cold canned asparagus. Who eats that? Would that imply a salad?

No, they are not to be eaten. They are to be marvelled at. They are beautiful, and their song is the sound of summertime.

http://faculty.msj.edu/kritskg/cicada/Site/Cicada_Facts.html