just cleaned out my hearing aids, and now for the first time i believe i'm hearing the cicadas.

have you heard them? have they arrived where you live? i'm genuinely curious about everyone's experience. and unlike most people, i actually like them.

sure, they are annoying, especially if they are eating everything in sight. my family complains about trees laid bare, wooded areas depleted to dead-looking trees, etc. (not sure this is cicadas, could be moths or another kind of pest) and also, people are not generally crazy about the sound. they also find that the skeletons hang around and crunch under your feet for some time. what is there to like?

one is that the cycles are odd: seventeen=year, thirteen-year, and the possibility, this year, that they might mate - what would happen? would their offspring become an average, fifteen-year? would this happen only in the limited areas that have them both?

maps show that the seventeen-year are up here, in western illinois, and in iowa, in the northern midwest, whereas down where we used to live in carbondale, the thirteen-year dominates. but maps also show that certain counties don't have them at all, and there are a few counties that have them both - as if the cicadas somehow respect these county boundaries. i have no doubt that their population is somewhat patchy and that these maps are doing the best they can to reflect that. but it makes me curious: is it because one species manages the hard winter better? or they don't like the windmills that have sprung up, a thousand per square foot in counties that allow them, and none in counties that don't?

i always thought the sound was cool, a little off tune, like an orchestra's violins tuning, but nevertheless relentless and interesting, and a sign that nature's cycles have come around. now, i've lost much of my hearing, and without hearing aids tinnitus is like a field of cicadas. but just now i asked my wife if she heard them (it seems to me that i'm hearing them now, and she said no. nor have we really seen them, and i know that when they do show up, you see them everywhere. i know some people around the country have seen them. but where are ours?

the hot weather is just starting here. june is sinking its teeth into the ecosystem. yesterday i mowed the last of my three yards, the biggest, and i could see evidence of bugs in general. but no locusts, yet. i haven't seen a single one.

when i do, i'm going to take some pictures. what i'd like you to remember is this: every creature has to eat; making noise is the best way to mate and perpetuate the survival of your species; any bug that is not hiding under your refrigerator or scurrying away when you turn on the kitchen light in the middle of the night, is basically living off nature and you don't have to consider it disgusting; and, finally, evidence of cycles and the return of cycles is basically good, and reassuring, like the sunrise, part of something we should be grateful for: that life is carrying on, as it did when we were children and as it hopefully will continue to do, for our descendants, if we don't blow it big time.