June 3, 2007

• Harking Back to Locusts, Lightning Bugs & Four Seasons

  I talked to my mom in Chicago this afternoon.  She said that “The locusts are back”.  Now before you go conjuring up images of some biblical swarm, the “locusts” were part of our lore as kids growing up in the suburbs of Chicago.  There were 13 year “locusts” and 17 year “locusts”, meaning each particular breed only emerged once every 13 or 17 years.  The breed my mother was referring to this year is the 17 year variety, and they aren’t really locusts at all, but rather cicadas.  From Wikipedia:

  The next brood to emerge is Brood XIII—the Northern Illinois Brood. After a seventeen-year hiatus, this brood is scheduled to emerge in 2007, in northern Illinois and in parts of Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana. However, sightings in northern Illinois have occurred as early as May 2006.

  

  Anyone who grew up west of The Mississippi River, has likely never seen this insect. They weren’t the prettiest bugs, though they were quite harmless and could easily be picked up and examined.  When I was a kid every 13 or 17 year cycle was amazing.  There were  literally millions of these insects covering every inch of every tree.  Their life cycle was short, about 2-3 weeks and their.numbers were massive:

  The nymphs emerge in large numbers at about the same time, sometimes more than 1.5 million individuals per acre (>370/m²).^[3] Their mass-emergence is a survival trait called “predator satiation”: for the first week after emergence, the periodic cicadas are an easy prey for reptiles, birds, squirrels, cats, and other small and large mammals.^[4][5] The cicadas’ survival strategy is simply to overwhelm predators by their sheer numbers, ensuring the survival of most of the individuals and thus of the species. It has been hypothesized that the emergence period of large prime numbers (13 and 17 years) is also a predatory avoidance strategy adopted to eliminate the possibility of potential predators receiving periodic population boosts by synchronizing their own generations to divisors of the cicada emergence.

  To our parents though, they were the worst kind of pests.  The noise they made was deafening and sometimes reached 100 decibels.  The noise continued all night long and was like a loud constant buzz.  As they fell dead from the trees we would scoop them up in jars to save, though the jars eventually disappeared courtesy of our parents.  Maybe I’ll be back in Chicago in 17 years to see them again.

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  The other magical thing about growing up in the Midwest was the fireflies.  We called them “lightning bugs” and they would come out at dusk on warm balmy evenings to light up our yards and provide constant enjoyment.  They were very easy to catch as they flew quite slowly.  We only needed to watch for the light and cup our hands over them.  When we uncupped our hands they wouldn’t fly away, they would just walk around for a while until we put them in a jar.  And oh the jars-full we caught.  We would keep them in our rooms at bedtime as magical nightlights that slowly lulled us to sleep.  The next morning we would let them go, presumably to catch them again that evening.

  

  Fireflies too, are rarely found east of The Mississippi, but if you’re ever lucky enough to be in the midwest in June or July, watch for them!

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  There are certainly many great things about being in California; the weather, the ocean, the weather, the weather.   There was nothing like the seasons in Chicago though.  The first thing people think of when you tell them you grew up in Chicago is the winters.  Yes the winters were cold, but I like to think they made us tougher.  In fact, every season in the Midwest was magical:

  • Summer, with its oppressive humidity, lightning bugs and lightning storms, that could literally start at any time and light up the sky with bright bolts and rumbling thunder.  Playing outside until nearly 10:00 when it finally got dark.  Swimming every day and enjoying the summer sun, as you knew it wouldn’t be around come winter.
  • Fall, with its warm days and cool nights.  Dew on the morning grass and the first frost.  Walking to the bus stop in mittens for the first time all year.  The leaves changing from green to yellow to red and then falling off the trees to be raked up in piles only to be jumped into.
  • Winter, with the magical first snowfall blanketing the aforementioned leaves.  The anticipation of going to bed at night with light snow flurries falling, only to wake up earlier than usual to a winter wonderland with snow deeper than your knees.  We always woke up early on the days that there might be a possibility that school would be canceled.  We would turn on the radio at 5 AM to listen to the announcer on WGN read endless lists of schools in the entire city.  We would just keep praying to hear “Hoover School in District 54, Schaumburg”.  Sometimes there were cheers, other times jeers.  Sometimes they would say school was open but there would be no bus service.  When that happened we would go into “sweetness mode” and do everything to try to convince our parents that driving in that kind of weather would be treacherous, and that they certainly cared about us more than risking our lives on the icy roads.  We would promise to clean the house and even clean our rooms, but inevitably we would play outside in the snow, building igloos and having snowball fights until we could no longer feel our fingers and toes.  We would come back in the house to the smell of hot cocoa on the stove, and Christmas cookies in the oven, while we dumped the wet snow out of our boots, hats and mittens.  Those were the days.

  

  That’s me on the right after a particulary heavy snow.  5 feet I think!

  • And finally Spring.  After dreary February and a last snowstorm in March, the snow lay in gray piles turning to ice crystals (the best and most painful for snowballs).  The tulips started peaking through the dirt and the first day the temperature was above freezing (32° F) we begged our parents to let us go to school in short sleeves.  Trees bloomed and the days grew mild and balmy.  Another cycle had finished as we looked forward to the end of the school year and summer and lightning bugs.

  • 9:33 pm
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