Cicadas

I prepared the coolest and best post for you about our local Cicada emergence and thanks to blogger going down on Wednesday, it erased my hard work and pictures. :( So... I'll give you the cliff notes version of my expounding. You can also go to Wikipedia to see a 'time sequence' of a hatching cicada (scroll down to the right side of the page once you enter 'cicada') in Ohio that looks just like the way our cicadas here do it (FASCINATING!!!) or for another Wiki reference and diagram of the more specific 13 year Tennessee cicada transformation we are currently living through.

We were living in Nashville and married less than a year the last time this crop of cicadas emerged. It was crazy!? I had never heard of such a thing in my life; bugs crawling out of the ground after 13 years of incubation, crawling up a tree, hatching an ugly white 'ghost' version of it's self with shrived up wings that dry out and become normal wings, dry out and turn black etc by morning then fly away to 'sing' and mate before planting eggs in a tree and dying. That's it! 13 years later, they repeat the process. I think they are lazy fliers which explains why they kinda fall onto you when you walk by their tree. EWE. My sister Katrina would D-I-E!!! Despite things like this they fascinated me then and still now. Michael patiently taught me how to hold them carefully by their wings so I could look at them better without hurting them (yes this was my idea, no one forced me. lol). I was in hair school at the time, Jon Nave University of Unisex Cosmetology (i know, LOL but it was the 'best' school at the time) on Charlotte Pike. I had to take 440 to get there. Point being, the drive home after 6 weeks of cicadas was so sad. The rain gutters along the side of the highway were covered with dead cicadas. :( So that is what I experienced before and what we have to 'look forward to' now for a few more weeks while the cicadas run their course. Here are some of our personal photos of what we've been watching this week and we love it! ;)

we seeeeee you little cicada dude.

the official cicada hunting uniform. i love it.