An opportunity for a harmless, abundant diversion from ‘the news’

I suspect that in a month or so, you will have heard and seen — and perhaps tasted, if you are adventurous — enough of the Brood XIII cicada to last you until its next appearance in 2041.

But for now, isn’t it nice to have such a harmless and prolific topic to distract us from our arguments over politics, culture and war?

We have been writing with anticipation since March about the impending return, now unfolding, of the 17-year cicadas to the suburbs, an event all the more engaging this year because of its concurrence with that of the 13-year Brood XIX cicadas. (No, I do not yet understand why the 17-year cicada is Brood XIII and the 13-year is Brood XIX; I’m sure I will learn in the coming weeks.)

The simultaneous appearance of the two cicada species hasn’t happened since 1803, a year before Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set out from southern Illinois on their two-and-a-half year mission to explore the North American West and collect and classify its mysterious flora and fauna. It won’t happen again until 2245. Who knows what explorers will be discovering and classifying then? Insect curiosities on other planets is my guess, if we can manage to get past the disputes over politics, culture and war.

Here in the suburbs, sadly, we will not experience the audible or visual vagaries of this rare convergence. One must head at least several hours south to become immersed in the full explosion of sound these noisy creatures will produce together. We must satisfy ourselves with the sounds and sights of just our half of it.

But what we experience is providing already its own intriguing definition of abundance. The trees in my Mount Prospect neighborhood have broken out in a veritable pox of cicada shells. The bodies litter the sidewalks in the thousands, like large, dark, occasionally humming, popcorn kernels or the debris in the park on the morning after Lollapalooza. You can scoop them up by the shovelful at the base of many trees.

How could this not give us something different, something fun, to talk about? Something to learn. Something to share.

With such questions in mind, we have begun to chronicle the Brood XIII emergence. We will doubtless have many stories to tell in the coming weeks, before they tunnel back deep into the soil to do whatever it is they do down there for all that time. Is it sleep? Is it hibernation? Do they dream about the few luscious minutes they will experience among the trees? Are those minutes actually their dreaming, and their time spent nestled underground the source of the true activity of their lives?

In his 1972 Booker Prize-winning novel “G.,” the late author John Berger describes a legend about cicadas.

“They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to,” he writes, in the voice of a character who is trying to seduce a married woman. There is, methinks, a metaphor somewhere in there to contemplate.

So much to question. So much yet to know.

If you have stories we should tell, let us know. Write me or one of our assigning editors Charles Keeshan (ckeeshan@dailyherald.com), Robert Sanchez (bsanchez@dailyherald.com) and Madhu Krishnamurthy (mkrishnamurthy@dailyherald.com).

Amid the politics, culture and war, we hope to take full advantage of this much-too-infrequent opportunity for diversion.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher.