I spent all of the morning and the first part of the afternoon manning a garage sale today.
I can stand the heat. I can endure the humidity.
But the constant jet-engine wail of the Brood XIII Cicadas has driven me utterly, irreversibly mad.
Mad, I say! Maaaaad!
And when I hit the road later in the day, I discovered that the cicadas have made everyone else mad!
People are driving like crazed drunkards, pedestrians stagger, dogs lay on the ground with their paws over their ears, whimpering. Even with the car windows rolled up and the radio blaring, I could still hear them.
There are so many damned cicadas in the air I actually managed to witness two of them colliding in flight.
Taking a walk this evening, I brushed up against a low-handing branch of a tree and was showered with chitinous confetti.
Watching them emerge from their nymph casings, white and pulsating, is the stuff of nightmares.
No wonder I get stomach-flops when I remember my neighbor crunching them down last Sunday night at the end of a (very long and over-served) Memorial Day picnic.
It's enough to make Colonel Kurtz leave Nam and book a room in the Tokyo Hilton.
(Photo of adult cicadas by Roy Troutman)
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