Cicada Invasion

As we prepare to go to Chicago as the first stop on our road trip, I've been thinking about some of the things I've missed and want to do while we're there. Most involve food, but one involves really gross bugs. When I was 7, the suburbs of Chicago experienced a cicada invasion. For those of you who don't know what a cicada is, it's a locust-like bug that looks like this:There are annual cicadas every summer in Illinois, and also here in Pennsylvania, but not many so you usually don't see them. You can hear them up in the trees, though, as they make a very distinct noise which has always sounded to me like someone shaking a maraca. When there are only a few cicadas making it, I think their sound is very relaxing, probably because I associate it with laying on a raft in my pool on a lazy August afternoon, with a symphony of faint whirring vibrations coming and going from the treetops lulling me to doze off.

There is a species of cicadas that is periodical: their eggs sit underground for 17 years before hatching, and there are hundreds of millions of them in the Chicagoland area. The summer of 1990 was the 17th year in Illinois, and trees everywhere became infested with cicadas. Even if you could hear yourself think over the noise made by the thousands of cicadas within hearing distance, you couldn't look at any greenery and not spot tons of cicadas.
As a 7-year-old tomboy who was not afraid of bugs, this was the coolest thing ever. My brothers and I spent countless hours in the backyard playing with them - trying to see who could collect the most molted cicada skins (see pic below), planning ways to gross out our babysitter, and trying to get our dogs to play with/eat the cicadas. For those good at math, you may have already noticed that 2007 is another "summer of the cicada" in Chicago. Unfortunately the cicadas have mostly already laid their eggs and died, and I am quite sad that I missed out on it. My friend Ethan brought me back a dead cicada from Chicago, which made me really happy, but of course it's not the same. Maybe in 2024 when I'm 41 I'll visit the western suburbs of Chicago and get the chance to re-live my cicada-filled youth.