The whirr of time comes again.

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Once every seventeen years the air is filled with a cacophony of click-clacking buzzing, that seem to be vibrating everywhere at once. It is the song of the cicadas. It is properly called crepitation. It is more commonly called a damned racket. The sound is inescapable. Then, five to six weeks later, it’s gone - as completely and suddenly as it came.

In different parts of the world, different kinds of cicadas emerge at different times; every thirteen years in some places, every seventeen years in other places. The ones around here come every seventeen years.

Whatever the span of time, it’s always far enough apart to forget when they came last. What were you doing seventeen years ago? What was I doing? It’s hard to remember. I think that’s because we tend to chop our memories into five and ten-year segments.

Seventeen years is an odd way of segmenting phases of your life.

Thinking in seventeen-year segments reveals surprises. It’s a long enough time for large changes in the life of any of us.

My first notice of cicadas came in the very early 1950’s. I was about seven years old. While idly roaming around the big front yard of my grandparents farmhouse, I noticed bugs, quite a few bugs, clinging motionless to quite a few trees. I also heard a sort of whirring buzz coming from all over.

I didn’t connect the bugs with the sound. Looking closely at one of the bugs, I could see that it wasn’t a bug at all. It was more like a shell of a bug. I pulled it off the tree. It was hard, transparent, and mystifying.

Grandpa Joe explained what he could about the bugs (actually insects) and the sound they made. Grandpa Joe didn’t have a lot of answers to my questions, but he patiently told me what he knew. I don’t think he was really interested in the topic – he did say they only came ‘round once every seventeen years.

In seventeen years I would be a grownup. Seventeen years after that, I would be middle-aged. Those were jumps in time I could barely imagine.

It was the first time I really thought about time.

All because of cicadas.

Seventeen years later I was twenty-four, living in a different state, married, with a son, and working at the profession, graphic design, which would be my career thereafter.

Seventeen years after that, I was forty-one, divorced, remarried, and running my own Design/Advertising company.

When the next seventeen years came ‘round, I was fifty-nine, and for the first time thinking seriously about retirement.

Seventeen years after that, I was retired, and at seventy-six, still writing the many essays I started writing several years before.

And now I’m thinking seriously about eternity.

How about you?

What will you be doing when the crepitation of the cicadas comes again? What were you doing the time before that?

Marking life changes by the crepitation of cicadas has a way of highlighting life-changing leaps you hadn’t much considered before.

Churr-churr, click-click, whirrr . . .

By K. L. Shipley

Website: https://www.eclecticessays.com