In Virginia.

I lived there from age 3 to age 8.  We had a mom, dad, baby sis, and a sap tree in the backyard.  Cotton tree, really, but the sap stuck on the wooden porch so much that your bare feet couldn’t come in the house without first picking off the leech-like buds that dropped from the branches.

We had a tree house that was on the ground.  You’d just call it a tree house, even if it wasn’t technically a house in the trees.  Sure, you can call it a playhouse, but the default misspeak seemed to always exit your mouth first.  Maybe I wanted one of those more, but the damn sappy cotton wood tree was too occupied with soiling the soles of my feet to bother with housing a good time in its timbers.

Virginia had cicadas.  Choruses of bugs every summer.  Epic life battles of love and death were sung from sun up to set.  It was sonically abrasive and every night when the window was opened eventually your ringing ears couldn’t tell the difference between insect hum and summer’s silence.  I was fascinated by the damn things.  Bugs that lived in the ground.  Then they came out of the ground.  Then they shed and left their skeletons and become different bugs?!  Who were these cicadas?

I was about 5 or 6.  I’d see these empty molds of these bug-eyed beings resting peacefully on the cotton tree.  Frozen shells of a past life.  Nature’s graffiti that seemed to say, “Cicada wuz here.”

One day, by our tree house that some would call a play house, I saw a one of these cicadas actually abandoning his exoskeleton before my eyes and entering his new stage in life.  Shedding his skin, shedding his past dirt world, he struggled and slowly emerged a vibrant green, a completely new entity.

My sister and I, too young to fully appreciate the miracle in front of us, watched mesmerized as mother nature spit something beautiful and kinda gross out onto the wooden plank.

We called our father over to look at this spectacle slowly emerging, tired and new.

We watched for a bit… Waiting for this miracle to be finished… It took too long.  Why wasn’t this creature coming out of its past-life tomb faster?  We had Sesame Street to watch or something.  We were busy kids with very important things to do.  We didn’t have time to wait for this bug to be ready to be a new bug any more.

I don’t know why we decided what we decided, but it was a family decision.

This miracle of life, this display of rebirth, this struggle of nature…

For some reason it became necessary to feed it to our pet gerbils.

I mean, this shedding process too took long.  The bug didn’t come out of it’s damn shell fast enough for a 6 year-old’s attention span.

Papa plucked the bug out of it’s shell.

The tired insect had no choice but to go along with its awful fate.  Seven years it had waited to burrow out from beneath the earth.  Seven years, and some fucking toddlers, some impatient tiny screechy humans who’ve been alive for less time than the insect itself, decided this fragile process was taking too long.  They screamed enough to convince their father that this bug would be better off in a bloody colosseum amidst two rodents.

Not more than three minutes into this world, the cicada was dropped six inches into an aquarium and devoured by two fury beasts no bigger than a shot glass.

We had no concept of death, or life for that matter.  It was just all technicolor imagery dancing before us with no consequences.

Now, I enjoy each summer when the cicadas blanket the evening’s airwaves.  I’m sorry I didn’t originally know about the cicada’s arduous journey, otherwise I would have been more appreciative and patient… less murderous.  If there was a plague of locusts once, the 6 year-old me subconsciously sought revenge.  Now, I just let the bugs be.