Friday, May 28, 2004
Cicada Heads
For those of you not living on the East Coast of the U.S.: right now there are over a trillion two-inch long bugs flying around every house, road and shopping mall. They are called cicadas and they look like a toy designer's bad idea of a Beetle Borg. (See http://www.agnr.umd.edu/users/hgic/cicadas/gallery1.html for a true bug's gallery of cicadas from birth to super-mature.) I am sure that most adults think these red-eyed molters are scary but they do not want to admit it. A typical Joe Cicada will slumber for seventeen long years in the ground and then hatch, fly around like a midnight wino and then lay their eggs wherever they can find a roost--preferably a big old maple tree. They fly into the house, they fly into the car, they bang into your head while you are jogging. A big one bashed into me while I was running this morning. Oh, and they leave their creepy exoskeletal carcasses everywhere when they die.
On the plus side, my mom's neighborhood also has a hefty supply of beautiful white-bodied black-winged dragonflies too.
