Brood X, our batch of seventeen-year cicadas, is getting easier to find, especially in Cherry Hill Nature Preserve. This 160-acre park owned by Superior Township is heavily populated by Brood X and people there to see and photograph Brood X. Sue and Tesla and I went walking there yesterday—Sue and Tesla’s second visit this week. There are lots of exoskeletons there, and newly emerged cicadas waiting for their adult bodies to harden enough to take flight. There are also cicadas on the wing, the first I’ve seen. One rode briefly on my shirt, its eyes the same color red as the fabric. For sheer numbers, Cherry Hill is the place to go.
It’s the place to go for sheer sound volume, too. Sue and I had to talk loudly in the open areas of the park to hear each other over the background noise of teenage male cicadas. Tesla couldn’t hear Sue when she called her. Sue had to whistle. Of course, Sue believes Tesla, who is no longer a young pup, doesn’t hear as well as she once did, whether or not Brood X is in full voice.
Brood X is getting easier to see around the neighborhood, too. Some trees—the Japanese zelkova on our court, for instance—are punctuated with cicada husks up their trunks, and surrounded by more. The ground must be crunchy underfoot if you’re not watching where you step. At the edge of Oakwoods Nature Area, under a tree with no vegetation around it, I could see the holes left by individual cicadas burrowing up out of the ground to begin the new phase of their lives. Frank and Elaine chatted with a woman who was sweeping her driveway as they walked by. The woman said both her drive and her sidewalk had been covered with cicada shells. Crunchy, crunchy, crunchy.
Many, many variegated hostas are beginning a new phase of their lives as well. They traveled by wheelbarrows-ful from Frank and Elaine’s back yard to ours yesterday. Frank and Elaine want to put something else where the hostas were, and they have lots more hostas left. Their generosity pleases me more than I can say. I can thin these robust offerings and nestle them in all around the back forty. Some of them will go near the ferns Frank and Elaine sent our way earlier this spring. I told them I’ll name the garden after them.
In ongoing celebration of full immunity, we had dinner with neighbors Corey and Tanya, outdoors at a real restaurant, a brewery in a deconsecrated, century-plus-old church in the town of Saline. We even drove there in the same car. Pretty exciting stuff after over a year of CoVid-19 caution—thank God for vaccines.
The company was pleasant, the day beautiful and summery. Tanya had called for a reservation days before, but could only get a 4:30 seating. In addition, the reservation was a time slot and included the time when the table would no longer be ours. We weren’t rushed, but the evening was young when we left. On the way home, we stopped by a plant nursery we hadn’t seen before, and even afterward we weren’t ready for the evening to end. We spoke of this and that and, gradually, our flights of fancy turned to flights of ice cream.
We picked up three different brands of strawberry ice cream. Corey went home for just the right ice cream scoop, then used it to form scoops that fit perfectly into twelve little glasses. We each had a flight of ice cream: the same three different kinds of strawberry goodness in the same three different kinds of glass. Using demitasse spoons, we tasted away. It turns out there’s a lot of variation in strawberry ice cream. At length, we finished our samples and discussed why we preferred the ones we did, and Corey told us what they were. Then we each had another perfect little scoop of our favorite. We decided that, all in all, it’s hard to go wrong with strawberry ice cream.
Making post-vaccination contact with one another feels like a beginning, a restart. We’ve all spent time at normal conversational distance, without masks, indoors and out. We’ve dined together. But not for a long time. The pandemic isn’t gone. We know this. We mask up when we’re supposed to and celebrate not having to wear masks and maintain our distance all the time anymore. Like the cicadas on the wing and hostas in new gardens, we’re ready for another phase. We’ve made it this far. We’re eager for what comes next. This is life emergent. This is life triumphant.
4 June 2021
I am looking forward to trying the restaurant in Saline. Ice cream tasting – what a great way to spend time with friends.