Have you ever wondered what those annoying little bugs are that make the buzzing noise all summer? Well thoughts are cicadas or the Cicadidae and I don’t find them annoying at all.
I know its weird but to me cicadas mean the beginning of true summer. The time when the grass will turn brown in the sweltering heat unless you use some of your precious water on the lawn. When they is no more school and everyone spends the day in or by a pool of water. When you can go out in the sun and spend all day without a care in the world. When the smell of fresh BBQ rules the air along side the smell of campfires. When your dally whair is a tank top and a pair of shorts with either no shoes or sandals.
Summer to me is not the last day of the school year. Nor is it a day on the calendar. It’s when you can go outside and smell your nabores grilling stakes or hamburgers and you can walk on the sun dried grass that you no longer have to mow every other day and you can just stand by the fence and talk to your neighbors about how hot it is out side. And you can hear the cicadas buzzing all day and night.
I believe in this because my family always has a huge bonfire the day after the first cicada is either spotted or heard. We do this because summer is very important to us along with family time together. I can remember this one year, about 9 years ago, out in my grandma’s field we were having our bonfire after my cousin Rhiannon spotted the first one of the year. As it was starting to get dark after we had finished cooking the stakes over a part of the fire and whole bunch of cicadas came flying out of the near by forest into the smoke from the fire and landed on the trees that made a circle around us and started there buzzing and we all started laughing as a whole bunch of fireflies came out too and started flying around us and we just kept laughing and talking. After that my grandpa brought out his old beat up Djembe drum so he could play along with the cicadas in the back ground. After this we all started dancing and laughing and talking and singing and stuff. We were out there all night.
A few summers after that the feeling around the bonfire was not as happy as the summer I just metciond, for you see, my grandpa had just died. The mood was not happy and there was no dancing or signing and very little talking even. There was no stake that year and there almost wasn’t even a bonfire for it toke us until late in the year to even spot the first cicada. All of us just sat there staring into the fire when all of a sudden out of the darkness a couple of cicadas flew out over the fire and we all kind of laughed a little and that started the talking. Sharing stories about grandpa and all the funny things he used to do.