Suddenly Last Summer

Some last minute party necessities sent me to Mashpee Commons yesterday via Route 151. It's a road I've driven repeatedly since being issued my driver's license 23 years ago.
On this end-of-summer trip I was reminded of the beginning of summer, when driving this road meant having my car pelted with cicadas.
In June they were everywhere on this stretch of highway, cluttering both road and sky. So much so, that like one's high school boyfriend, you just couldn't help obsessing about them.
Now they are gone, those bugs that looked and sounded so much like creatures from another planet. Not a trace of them remains, which makes it easy to forget they were ever here at all. And maybe we should forget about them. Why not? Seventeen years is a long time to go on remembering such a short-lived phenonomen.
In my periphereal vision, however, I see patches of brown leaves among the green on the oak trees, and I know that the cicadas were here after all because they left something left behind. The trees were touched, literally, by those big, clunky, noisy, bugs. I was touched, figuratively, by their ephemeral nature.
Things that are short-lived often have far-reaching effects.
Life, and locust, are like that.

song: Suddenly Last Summer • artist: The Motels