March of the Cicadas is in full swing. Their drone is like permanent tinnitus even inside the house or driving down the road with the windows rolled up on the car. This is a 17 year brood and you can see them on that water maple out front. They dig their way out of the ground and begin crawling up the side of the tree until prompted by their strange biologic clocks to hatch and then go do buggy things like breed, eat, and die. As kids we used to tie strings to them and they would fly around in big circles...yes, it is a hill billy kite. Deal with it!
This one is busy hatching. I think their red eyes are so cool!
And as husks, no those are not peanuts but roughly the same size, eventually fall off to the ground they really pile up! So there is a huge collection at the base of the tree. There truly are bazillions of them.
So...rumor control has it that a 17 year brood hatched the year of the Salem Witch trials...greatly contributing to the insanity of the times...through sound torture. You know, we had reports of horses in the area...last time they were here...eating them and getting sick and dying. I recall a woman in the witch trials was accused of making cattle sick with her wicked spells. Hmmm...
Oh yes, recall me griping about the gas industry? Well this year it is so odd. Many of the adults are lying around dead too, their wings are crumpled up and malformed. I don't suppose having to crawl through ground that no way in hell could have been contaminated by the chemicals in fracking fluids...all known endocrine inhibitors...would have had ANY IMPACT! I really wish I could take pictures of the frogs in our water lily pond, but sadly there are no frogs at all this year!
So yeah, don't even get me started on mountain top removal. Gonna change our state motto from Almost Heaven to Almost Level. Hilary, you know what you can do with your proposed 30 billion dollar hush money to the coal communities. Please bitch; don't give my neighbor a band-aid when what the whole state needs is a blood transfusion.
