Cicadas Song

 

 

May will forever be the Song of the Cicada for me.

Ever heard the churring sound the cicadas? If not, stop reading. Go find the sound and listen to it. This story won’t make sense without the residue of cicada song in your ears.  

Go on. I’ll be right here until you get back.   (   https://youtu.be/ooiSfD2a6pI   )

From ages three to six, every summer, I would visit my grandparents on Lake Burton. My grandfather held small appeal to me as a little girl. He was rough and tumble and while kind, also aloof. My grandmother, however, doted on me. I adored her. My grandmother would take lots of time coating my skinny arms with sun screen and even putting it in the part of my hair, knowing that towheads get sunburned scalps. My mother would be reading on the dock and my father and grandfather would be working on a boat somewhere while grandma and I floated endlessly in the cove of the lake. She would ask me questions no one else would. She would be excited for my adventures and tell me stories about her adventures. We would dive and swim and play in the lake for hours until I was forced to sit on the dock in the sun and eat lunch. Then right back into the water with my grandma, I’d go.

I swam myself sore every day.

 It was paradise.

At night, I was put in the “kid’s room” which was basically a sleeping porch with widow slats that you could roll open and closed. I was usually so sun-burned that grandma would insist on rubbing aloe on my legs and arms for an hour. My skin felt electric with sun on those nights; it would stick to the cotton sheets which I usually flung off anyway because the room was heavy with thick Georgia air.

Mom and dad and Grandpa would be on the back porch laughing and drinking while Grandma would rub my legs down and we’d talk about our day. It’s one of those memories you look back on that gets smoother as you turn it in over and over in your mind—like a pebble in a stream. The rough edges wear away and all you see on that memory is a honey glow. I wish I could say that amber memory is the only one I carry of those summer nights.

Of course you know, it isn’t.

Cicada songs around a lake come and go in cycles. Some years, the song is sweet and light and lovely. It lulls you to sleep. Some years—like the year before my seventh birthday—it is deafening. My mother was pregnant with my brother and had sent me to my grandparents (I’m quite certain), to get me out of the way so she could have a moment of peace before my brother was born.

My sweet mother was hugely pregnant with my brother. My mom is pixie-small. My brother was so large that I sometimes wondered how mom walked at all. She seemed to defy gravity. I knew my brother was going to change things, but even before he was born he seemed to be transforming what I knew to be everyday routine into something different and unstable. Truthfully, her physical appearance unsettled me a little. She didn’t seem to make sense to me—her tiny little frame was not meant for this large ball on the front. I was happy with the thought that by the time I got home from the lake, she would be back to her original form and normal again. No longer off-kilter.

 It was my first night at the lake without my parents, just grandma and grandpa and me, and I couldn’t have been happier. Without mom and dad, my grandparents had given me all the things I shouldn’t have: two hot dogs for dinner, french fries from the frozen bag, and cherry ice cream with a dash of Chambord on top. Stomach full to bursting, legs aching from swimming, arms sticky with aloe, I sat up in my bed as my grandma patted my feet and talked to me about what was about to happen.

I knew mom was going to have a baby, and while I didn’t quite understand the mechanics of it, I did know it meant I was going to become a BIG sister. In my mind, anything that made me a BIG deal sounded great.

“You know the new baby is going to need lots of love, right?”

I nodded solemnly. Of course I knew that. Babies couldn’t even eat by themselves. They could only lay there and coo and giggle.

“You know that sometimes you’re going to get mad that your mom and dad aren’t going to be able to pay attention to you because the baby needs them, right?”

I nodded, but suddenly I felt a little panicky. A little cherry-flavored burp bubbled up. The cicada song outside rose as the pressure in my ears was released with the little “erp.” It got very loud in that tight sleeping porch. I hadn’t realized that my parents’ love had a finite limit. That with my brother’s arrival, it meant that I would have to have less.

My grandmother said more things. Soothing things, I’m sure. But I don’t remember any of them.

I remember the feeling of that little pop in my throat and the cicada song swelling along with my panic.

That night was a new moon—very dark---which seems to always make the cicadas sing louder, as though they know they cannot be seen by owls at night so they can trill to their hearts’ content. The sound of cicadas when they are very loud does not sound soothing. It varies up and down. At times, it seems they are all talking at once, then they fall into a rhythm. The cheep-cheeping is broken up by three or four outliers that signal the others to fall into pace. The chirping undulates up and down like a breaker against a seawall. The sounds rolls, surges, and then falls away again. The pattern stays like that until you feel as though you are falling asleep to the sounds of the ocean outside your window only to have a single “CHEE CHEE CHEE CHEE” break it all up again until they are fighting to be heard over the other. Scritching noises, like claws on bark up and down a tree—hundreds of them in varied places in the woods outside your window. Then back into a pattern for another ten minutes.

That night the cicada song was very loud, so loud in fact that I started hearing things in it.

When your brain is allowed to wander, when you are alone with your thoughts, it seeks patterns. It’s natural for that to happen. When I was older and studying the brain in college I found out that there are several theories about pattern recognition and brain development but one of the most important things about pattern seeking is that it is fundamental to how we learn, process, and use language. Children with high shape-recognition show better grammar knowledge, even when controlling for the effects of intelligence and memory capacity. This is supported by the theory that language learning is based on statistical learning, the process by which infants perceive common combinations of sounds and words in language and use them to inform future speech production. Phonological development is the next step of this little process and finally the pattern seeking steps up to grammar knowledge. The better the pattern-seeking neurological pathway of the brain, the more linguistic the child.

Would it surprise you to know I was a pretty verbal child?

Needless to say (ha-ha) I heard and saw patterns a lot. I think it makes me a good communicator now. As a kid, it can scare the shit out of you.

The human tendency to see patterns that do not actually exist is called apophenia.

As I lay in my bed, I rolled onto my side to look out the window. The vacillations of the cicadas chirping had lowered slightly and I felt a little less shaky in my grasp of reality. I could only see out the shoebox sized hole of the roll-slat windows and the screen was cakey with clay dust, but I could see the cicadas dive bombing the green yard light on the post above the picnic table in the yard. Grandma and grandpa must have gone to bed because I no longer heard their quiet voices or the television. All I could hear was the rise and fall of the cicadas who had found their rhythm again.  They oscillated up and down and I tried not to focus too closely on the noise. Still it began to sound like a chant. “yes… Yes…yesYes. yesYes. Yes. Yeayeayeayeayeayeayeayeayea.” I squinted at the screen in front of me and scratched away at some of the dirt. The green light haloed the picnic table and the moment I looked away from it everything else was unseeable. Bright green blotches filled my room as I glanced around, the afterburn effect of the light in dark.

The cicadas fell out of rhythm as three or four of them trilled out of order. Then they all argued with one another loudly.

The ones dive-bombing the green light appeared massive. I later came to find out this particular year was the year that the 17-year cicadas came out. Did you know there are different types? Some come out every year. Those are the ones you probably know. They are little black-eyed guys. Transparent wings, black or green bodies, hang out in trees—easy going fellows. They are actually symbols for care-free living.

The 17-year-cicadas scientifically known as Magicicada, (no, I am not kidding) come out in massive numbers and are red-eyed demon-looking bugs. They are larger, have big red mandibles and arms, and their wings are red-tinted. Both species house their ears and voiceboxes in the same place: namely their chest. But the 17-year cicadas’ song is infinitely louder because when they emerge from their slumber, they come out in masses. They are the things bibles warn you of—mark your doorway and all that.

Being only six, I had no idea that 17-year-old cicadas were even a thing. All I knew is that there is no light but the green halo light on the picnic table, that giant red-bugs were dive-bombing said solo-light source, and that the noises they were making were so loud I could swear it was actually people yelling back and forth in the night. People yelling “YES YEA YEAH YES YES YESYESYEYSYAYAYAYAYAYAYYAYAA….”

And also that my parents were going to love me a little bit less by the time I got home.

I lay in bed trying to trick my mind into not hearing pattern. I purposefully tried to hear single voices of the cicadas so it wouldn’t sound like a stadium of people outside my window going “YEAYEACHEAY CHEAYCHEAYEA…che…che..chechechehchehchehehheheheheheheheheh.” I played this trick before on my mind. It’s actually how I find four-leaf clovers so easily. Blur your mind to see beyond the pattern. Find the outlier. Focus on it. Focus on the next.

Tonight the outlier wasn’t the yea-yea-cheyea-chyea- of the cicadas it was the che-tup-che-tup-che-tup of the bug dive-bombing the green light. I scratched more dirt away from the screen so I could more properly view the fist-sized bug that was persistently trying to fly into the green light situated at the top of a post near where we ate our lunches.

I saw a large reddish-black insect thunking continuously into the green glow of the glass casing. Behind that, just out of full view on the light was the picnic table. I couldn’t see all of it. The back part of the table was curtained in darkness.

But I thought I saw someone standing there. Just beyond the edge of the table. Standing behind it as though to supervise. I saw a tall willowy figure. As I focused on it,  it leaned towards me.

When my brain made the connection that there was something or someone at the backside of the table, the cicada song swelled so loudly I sat straight up in bed, removing the view. I stumbled off the bed away from the window and pushed my feet hard onto the wooden floor, taking short quick breaths that seemed to vibrate with the sound of the cicadas “CHE-CHA-CHE-CHA-CHE-CHA-CHE.” Something was at the end of the table. With my eyes shut the sound of the cicadas was amplified and reverberated in my chest. Something tall enough to be a man but far too skinny, leaned over the table towards me. Did it see me? Was it watching me now?

I needed to ground myself. I rocked back on my heels and thumped forward on my toes. Opening my eyes, I scanned the dark room around me, seeing only the green afterburn of the post-light.

That was it. My eyes were seeing the green light shadowed and mirrored into the dark. There wasn’t anything there. There was nothing at the end of the table. I had just scared myself a little. My pattern-seeking brain had a made a man out of a mole-hill. The cicadas softened their trill in agreement. “She-SH-She-SH-She-SH-She.” Nothing there. Calm down. Just a shadow of a light. I knew my own brain well enough to know it sometimes played tricks on me. Seeing patterns that weren’t there. Apophenia—all though I didn’t know the name.

It took several minutes of me standing there focusing on the feel of the floor under my feet and trying to ignore the sound of the cicadas who were shushing me, before I felt soothed enough to sit on the bed.

I lay on my side with my back to the window. I would not scare myself again. Still, I could not shake the image of a  dark thing—a someone—leaning over the edge of the picnic table. “zer-zee-zer-zee-zer-zee-zer-ziz-zer-zist-er-zist-er-zis-ter.” My back grew tense. It was watching me.

I turned to face the window. The thunk-chirring of the big bug ramming into the light now had my attention. “Doesn’t that hurt?” I thought. “Doesn’t it know that it is hurting itself? Why does it keep ramming itself forward like that?” Compelled was the word I needed that I didn’t have at age six. It was compelled to repeatedly try to get to that light. If I just focused on that bug, I wouldn’t even see the picnic table, let alone the thing at the end of it. I tried to trick my mind like I always did. Focus on the outlier.

I watched the bug, willing myself to focus on its relentless pursuit of that green, steady glow. It thumped forward and reared back, thumped forward and reared back. As I watched, becoming more horrified, I realized it too had a pattern. It was timing its thunking of the light to the ebb and flow of the song. As this realization occurred another, one that I tried to push away, slunk forward. The shadow was moving again. It was growing longer somehow. Stretching?

The cicadas became riotous in their chanting and I felt dizzy. The whole room was swimming and swaying on a sea of their noise. I felt afloat in it. My bed felt like it was rocking, much like a dock that rocked back and forth on a cove as the waves roll in from the larger lake. It was like flying on sound. The sound was not soothing. It sounded angry and persistent and in the back of my mind, I still felt it sounded like people. Angry people. People angry at me.

As I watched the big boy thunk and thunk and thunk into the light I tried my hardest to keep my peripheral vision from seeing even a sliver of the darkness as the edge of the table. I was certain that the darkness had extended one long black finger from its designated space to reach across into the light. Like it knew that if I could just see that long black finger I would have to admit something was there. It was a battle of wills. The cicada song was drumming now. My body vibrated with it, the room tumbled in midair on a cascade of sound. Edgar Allen Poe was fond of the word cacophony. This was that but with a maddening sense of pattern too. A pattern that repeated just long enough for you to make nonsensical meaning out of it “OW ow owowow OW Wowo wowo wowoOWOWOWO DerOwDedeledealdededDEDEDdeded”.

I dared not look at the shadow finger that now extended impossibly long across the table. The darkness reached out from its edge and was grasping for the edge of the light that spilled on the table. The shadow I couldn’t see, I felt. It felt wrong and menacing and accusatory. The big-boy THUNKED and the cicadas swelled and went ENDENDendnednendnendENNENDNENENDNENENDN” I lay on the bed and tried to keep my brain from unravelling all around me. Was this crazy? When Tom and Jerry cartoons showed someone with coo-coo clocks for eyes, is this what they meant? The bed rolled like an unruly boat beneath me. The darkness was splotched with green at the edges of my eyes, but I refused to look away from the bug that was thunking itself against the green light. Part of me knew that the darkness that was now leaning further across the table was reaching for me. That it wanted me. That I would allow it into my room and into my mind if I acknowledged it was there.

I. Just. Had. To. Focus. On The Bug. Thunk-chir-Thunk-Chir-THUNK-CHIR-CHIR-CHIR-DEN-DEN-END-Thunk-EN-DEN-DEN-END-ND-ND-ND-Focus.On.The.Bug

THUR-ND-THUR-END-THE-N-ETH-EN-THEN-THE-ND-The rolling bed rose on a massive wave of sound as it felt like every cicada in the world filled my room with their sound THUR-ND-THUR-END-NDTHE-TH-N-ETH-EN-THEN-THE-END-THE-ND-THEN-THEN-I floated above the sheets with vibration, my whole body felt like the floor was rolling up to meet me halfway up the wall.

I grasped the edge of the bed, stomped down upon the wooden floor that now felt unpredictable and immaterial. Looking down at, I was shocked as a wave of red exited my body.

I threw up everything I had eaten that day. Had I been wearing them, I would have up-chucked my shoes.

The sound of my violent heaves must have woken my grandma (although how she slept through the cicada racket, I’ll never know). She rushed into the room and turned on the light.

She turned on the light.

Why hadn’t I done that? Instead of forcing my mind to the brink of madness, why hadn’t I just turned on the dang light?

So maybe I had a little too much Chambord on my ice cream and maybe I was floating on waves a little too much that day. Maybe the fear of being replaced by my brother and the coincidence of the 17-year cicada song all led to a little apophenia.

Maybe.

Maybe.

May.

Be.

Me.