Not too long ago, I returned to the Washington, DC, area, and now I live just a short walk from the hospital where I was born. I did not expect to return or to like being here once I did. To my happy surprise, DC turns out to be a pretty good town. I know I am in the minority when I say that, and I'll expound some other time. But almost weekly something slightly magical happens that makes me fall for DC a little more.

One of these magical things just about to happen is The Return of the Periodic Cicadas.

You probably have cicadas where you live: big bugs that fly around like errant ping pong balls, climbing to the tops of trees and bushes, screeching at the top of their lungs, "Love me, oh why won't anyone love me ... " Only it sounds more like this:

SHHHHhhhhhhhhHHHHHHhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhh

Okay, they're only sort of bugs. Depending on whose classification you use, they're in the Hemipteroid assemblage, but not grouped with true bugs, Heteroptera. What this means is that, among other things, they have sucking mouthparts. (More traditional classifications have cicadas in Homoptera and true bugs in Hemiptera, but I say, a bug by any other name still sucks.) They don't have lungs, but they do have large resonating chambers inside them that help males get the word out, and the muscles they use to vibrate the sound producing membranes are extraordinarily well developed. Their pulsing song really is a plea for attention from the fairer sex.

In addition to the annual kind, some cicadas come out once every 17 or 13 years, and come out by the millions. Tens, even hundreds, of thousands of these red-eyed bugs might emerge from a good cicada acre. For a few weeks, bird song is curtailed, traffic noise seems muted, and outdoor conversations are punctuated with periodic what's, as these bugs scream for love. While this goes on, everything has a "Day the Earth Stood Still" quality to it. Females fly lazily to singing males, and people get used to running their windshield wipers as they drive. Cicada exoskeletons litter the base of almost every tree as these beasts crawl from the ground, emerge from their last juvenile skin, and fly away. And then, a few weeks later, adults die and none return for more than a decade. All of this is just a little spooky, but I find something joyful about it too: Seventeen years of chastely hiding underground, then all at once, everyone pops up and sings and flies and loves and dies.

Their return raises bunches of questions, among them: Why every 17 (or 13) years? Why so many? When can I see them? How do they taste? There are a dozen good bug stories to tell about cicadas, and I might get to some of them. This is just a short entry and I will try to add pictures and other information as appropriate. In the meantime you might want to check out the University of Michigan's Periodical Cicada Page.

The last time the periodic cicadas came to DC, I was about to leave the area for good (I thought). In my neck of the woods, a traveling circus makes its rounds to the local strip malls -- you know, one of those portable amusement parks with a few rusty rides, an obese pony, and a drunken clown, all ferried about by a handful of shifty-eyed carnies trying to stay one step ahead of the police. A sibling noticed that my periodic visits to DC coincided with the little circus's and guessed that I had become a clown or a carnie. I suggested instead that the circus came to celebrate my return.

That's sort of how I feel about the periodic cicadas, except this time, I'd like to celebrate theirs.

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