I'm curious if this doomsayer thinks he's doing us a favor, all wrapped up in his doom-and-gloom duds. How could anyone possibly enjoy the remaining days knowing that the End Times are just around the corner?
I suppose some people welcome the pronouncement, using it as a wake-up call to start checking off their bucket lists. But I don't keep a bucket list and, frankly, I don't foresee jotting one down in the near future.
That's why I'm so glad that the cicadas have finally returned! Their absence, which most of us had noticed--with some alarm--seemed far more damning than any scriptural speeding ticket we could have received. What did it mean, we asked ourselves in the privacy of our own minds, that our late-summer evenings were punctuated by the absence of droning?
Turns out that this year's crop of cicadas is like my newspaper carrier, not in any particular hurry to deliver the goods. And, as the old adage goes, better late than never. Unless it's the newspaper. . . .
Ah, but I digress. Back to the cicadas and why I'm so dadgum happy that they've returned.
Even if we don't say it aloud, we Midwesterners love our seasonal rhythms. And it's one of the most endearing things that our environment offers us. Like sailors circumnavigating the globe using stars not sextants, we Midwesterners keep track of the passage of time with the height of a corn stalk, the first crocus, the meandering line of geese. The drone of the cicadas.
Take these away or delay their arrival, and we start to get a little nervous. Not that a Californian would ever recognize the sign of nerves in a Midwesterner. . . .
So it was with private revelry and an extra long sigh of relief that I celebrated this week's returning evensong of Periodic Cicadamorpha (I looked it up).
Turns out, the sky really isn't falling, Chicken Little. Like their easy-going Midwestern neighbors, the cicadas were just taking their time this year.
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