The Cicada Tree
On the morning of my daughter’s third birthday, I found a magnificent, newly-hatched cicada on our maple tree. Its wings were clear jade; its eyes rubies. She held it on her tiny hand, unafraid. Though it was her third birthday, it was the first birthday she’d ever had the chance to celebrate as part of a family and the cicada felt like a wonderful portent of the new life we shared together since we’d adopted her at age two in November 2013.
I have loved cicadas since I can remember. When I was eight, my father took me to the cicada tree, a magical old oak deep in the holler next to a little white church. Every seventeen years, the cicadas emerged there, climbing up into the oak’s gnarled branches, singing from every burl and leaf.
I stood in amazement, watching the golden flights of them, listening to the low drone of their song, and feeling like it was the closest I could get to angels, if angels crawled up out of hell on golden wings on their way to heaven.
That moment is wedged deep in my brain. I have often dreamed of a forest of ancient oaks with moving golden lights in their branches, surely the lit wings of cicadas on their maiden flight.
The last time they came, it was 2003. My father was fighting for his life against cancer, though it would be his last year on earth. I was living alone again, as the only work my wildlife biologist husband could find was in Florida. I drove that summer to Michigan for a conference, still trying to understand who I was as a writer. I remember the cicadas coating my windshield in a thick, gory slurry through West Virginia. I don’t remember much about the conference at all except that it was another place I didn’t fit, no matter how hard I tried. But I would drive all night to try to prove that I belonged somewhere, anywhere other than here. To prove myself important still. No matter how clipped my wings had been by all that had come and gone.
That winter I couldn’t bear the separation any more, and I called my husband home from Florida when things started going really badly for my father. By the end of February 2004, my father was gone.
In the time he was home, my husband volunteered again with the bear research center where he’d worked prior to our departure for Hong Kong in 2000. There, he was asked to train a student who was supposed to be capturing Asiatic Black Bears for the Smithsonian in the far west of Sichuan province. Only it turned out this student absolutely hated his job, hated China — couldn’t stand the food, couldn’t be bothered to try to communicate with the locals, hated being so isolated. The upshot of it all was that my husband ended up taking his position and began pursuing his Master’s degree under the auspices of the Smithsonian’s international wildlife conservation program.
In the span of three months, I lost my father, lost my husband again to graduate work, and then lost my beloved dog to a brown recluse spider in the basement of my new home.
Devastated, I went deeply underground inside myself.
I don’t remember that year at all, really. By then, I was teaching again and writing. I lived alone for nine months out of the year until my husband’s research visa expired and he had to come back to the US to renew it. Since the research station was deep in the Min Mountains, we could only communicate via email or instant messenger at very specific times of the day or night and then only as long as the station hydropower was working. Sometimes I wouldn’t hear from him in weeks, and of course I’d not heard his voice in months.
I was used to the separation — we’d lived most of our married life this way, but it wore on me sometimes. And in the summer of 2005, during my first summer break, I joined him. I will tell those stories another time — they could fill an entire book on their own. At the end of the summer, we departed the research station together to spend time in Hong Kong and renew my husband’s visa. I wanted to see old friends we’d left behind five years previous when my father had called me home.
One day, as I wandered the Jade Market with my dear friend Vivian, I spied a jade cicada pendant. She helped me bargain for it (since I was and remain absolutely terrible at haggling), and I slipped its heavy smoothness around my neck. It hung there over my heart for many years, a reminder that the Chinese had once placed jade cicadas on the tongues of the dead to ensure their resurrection during the Han dynasty. As the National Museum of Asian Art mentions, “In general Chinese lore, cicadas are creatures of high status. They are considered pure because they subsist on dew and lofty because of their perch in high treetops. An ancient analogy in China suggests that a high-ranking official should resemble a cicada: residing high, eating a pure diet, and with sharp eyes.”
Mothers in Hong Kong still make a soup from the shells of cicadas to aid their young students at finals time.
Last year, the cicadas came again and it was as if my heart burst open with their emergence. I heard them for the first time since before my father had passed. I went outside as much as I could to hear them during their mating season — a distant roar that sang from every bit of forest they could find. At first, all I found were the cases of nymphs, but finally one day a cicada flew into the garden where my husband was working and he brought it to me.
There again the ruby eyes and golden-lace wings of the periodic cicada, Magicicada cassinii, the very shape of it somehow so beloved and familiar. Are these things of the earth that we love so unquestioningly somehow the result of our own resurrection and rebirth long ago?
One summer day, while my son was in the hospital having a painful test, I took my daughter to try to find the cicada tree because we were not allowed to be in the hospital with him due to COVID19. We drove through the old neighborhood where my father and then I spent our childhoods. I showed her the house where my grandmother had birthed 12 children, raising 11 of them to adulthood. It looked like it hadn’t been painted since I’d lived there over twenty years ago as a newlywed graduate student. I showed my daughter the woods where we’d played, the hills we’d sledded down — that one hill where the cow ate my dad’s textbooks in the snow. I drove past where we used to walk, the gated road that led to Niagara Dam on the Roanoke River from which my childhood friends had once wheeled a giant snapping turtle in a wheelbarrow up the road so their mom could cook it.
I ended up following the road all the way to the river, where an empty house looked out with hollow eyes as the water wound by. If this essay was meant to be neat and circular, I would have found the cicada tree instead of an empty parking lot full of garbage and river brown with silt. I would’ve taken my daughter to the tree and a cicada would have lit upon her brow, spreading its golden wings, imparting the knowledge of its resurrection.
But all I found was the buzzsaw symphony of annual cicadas in the trees, the swoop of swallowtails, and my daughter bounding over boulders like a mountain sheep while we waited to know the outcome of my son’s tests. I wondered if the cicada tree had been a dream all along, and then I realized it didn’t matter, because it had taught me its wisdom whether it was real or not.