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On July 181 heard die dry, winding-down sound of the annual cicada. This one is with us each July and August as the males lure females to them by their persistent, tired-sounding rasp. The annual cicada spends seven years underground as a nymph to emerge as an adult for a brief place in die summer sun.
The throbbing drone of the 17year cicada that filled the June days with the sound is but a memory, if even that. Who kept a record and noted the last day of the relentless — to some — ominous monotony of the male cicadas? When did it end? Was there a gradual cessation of sound or did it end abrupdy?
I find fragments of delicate, red-Veined wings among the leaves in my wild flower garden and bits of nymphal skin turn up in the soil of our vegetable patch. The remains of the myriads of cicadas that filled the world with sound in June are now a part of the soil that nourished them for 17 years.
As I travel through the Virginia Piedmont drooping brown leaves on terminal twigs indicate where the female cicada has deposited her eggs. With the slit where eggs were deposited the food supply has been cut off; the leaves have died. Cicada signs are spotty; in some areas there are none. In others trees appear to have some grotesque decoration. Route 211 west from Warrenton has many trees that have been “. . zapped by die cicadas,” as Lee Trott puts it. My favorite drive, Route 647
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