Hello, It's Me

 I live in the doughnut hole of the Brood-X emergence.

All around me are areas where the 17-year cicadas are singing, dancing, flying, mating. Not here. I'd been so looking forward to it and expected to be in the geographic area where they are emerging, but it's been a cicada drought here. I've read a few articles and it's true. They don't seem to like Philadelphia and the surrounding environs, except for a few lucky places.

I miss the songs.

Last week I drove down to Washington to spend a day and night with Mom before heading down to North Carolina to hang out with my daughter at the beach for a few days while she was there for a visit from Chicago. The air hangs heavy in the metropolitan area with the songs of cicadas, with their flight, with their dive bombing cars in motion. I'd been listening to Like A Hurricane, when I first heard them. The car window was open and my hair was blowing in the wind when Neil Young's melody mixed with the harmony of the cicadas.

I heard them again when I came back through town and again when I was down there over the last few days. I've really missed them here are home, where it usually feels so noisy but lately has seemed eerily silent.

Traffic was heavy today on I-95, rain pounding through much of Maryland, and as I approached the third traffic stall due to accidents, I turned to my right and discovered I was not alone in the car.

Hello, it's me.

A tiny cicada was walking on my red cooler. It walked over to the back of the front passenger seat, and did a circuit on the handles of my purse, on the zipper, dipping inside and out again. That cicada rode all the way home with me, sounding like a fire alarm only once when I attempted to move it back to a comfortable distance from where I was sitting, and driving, hoping to forestall any flights into my hair. 

But the cicada seemed perfectly happy just hanging out and walking around.

I think it may have hitched a ride with me on the flowers I cut from my mother's garden before I left. They've been flying in and out of the hydrangea bushes, in and out of the trees, in and out of the trumpet flower vines, in and out of just about anything green in my mother's garden. 

Come to think of it, I'm not sure I remember seeing them around here last time either. 

The time before that I spent the summer in Brooklyn for an internship, and I don't remember seeing them there either.

But 1970? I remember that year well. They were thick in Washington, where I grew up. And I was little. It was a wonder to me. Truth be told, it still is.

My driving companion took off shortly after we arrived here. I wonder what adventures it will find and whether it stayed. I'm close to the river and New Jersey, so maybe it flew across the river in search of others to sing with. Or hitched a ride with someone driving across the bridge. 

A Hundred Days of Happiness is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and every year brings new wonder. She asks big questions of the small things in life.