Song about cicadas
This is a song I've been writing for a few weeks. I've never tried to write songs before, but sometimes I'm playing guitar and I sing something and I'm surprised how true it feels.
The most recent emergence of the Brood X cicadas was 2021, the last summer we were in Michigan. I would go to the nature preserve every day, sometimes with Comet and sometimes alone, to look for the holes in the ground they were digging. After the emergence I would run along the Huron River and the trees around me were buzzing with cicadas.
We moved at the end of the summer and I decided I would come back to Michigan for the next emergence. Brood X are 17-year periodic cicadas and it hit me how long that is. I first lived through a Brood X emergence when I was 10, a kid in Pennsylvania, then 17 years later when I was an adult living in a different state, getting married in two months. I struggled to imagine the next time I'll see the Brood X emergence. I'll be 44 years old. I remember realizing Comet would be dead by then. Who knows what else will change.
Brood X cicadas get a few months in the world every 17 years. I think about that perspective, what the arc of my life will look like if I just see those 5 or 6 summers before I die. I used to do a thing when I was feeling really terrible where I'd wish for knowledge of what one second of my day would be like in 5 or 10 years or whatever. Imagining that life continued at all would be enough perspective. That's what I was thinking about when I was singing this song, the beautiful parts in the arc of my life as I accumulate the weight of living and how small that all looks to a cicada brood that emerges every 17 years for thousands of years.