Cicadas and Summer

There is something I find myself noticing every summer since I began living in Korea.

Cicadas.

When the rainy season ends and the temperature suddenly begins to rise, the sound of cicadas can be heard here and there throughout the residential neighborhoods.

When I was a child growing up in my hometown, hearing cicadas was simply a part of summer.

The sky I would look up at while listening to their calls was an endless blue, with towering summer clouds floating against it, their edges sharply defined.

Whenever I hear the cicadas and see those towering clouds, scenes from the summers of my childhood in my hometown suddenly come back to me.

I never paid much attention to it before, but over the past few years, it seems to me that there have been far more cicadas.

I wonder if it has something to do with global warming.

At the beginning of this summer, a cicada came to me in a rather unusual way.

On my way home, I felt something strange around my neck, as if something was touching it.

When I got home and reached up to touch it, I discovered that it was a cicada.

For a moment, I was startled.

“Why is there a cicada on my neck…?”

But it was probably a cicada that had only just emerged from its shell.

Perhaps, after emerging in the darkness, it simply grabbed onto the nearest thing it could find.

And by chance, that happened to be my neck.

I gently moved it outside the window, and after a while, it flew away somewhere.

Even though it was only a cicada, I had never experienced anything like that before, so the encounter has stayed with me.

I sometimes find myself wondering whether the cicada that happened to cross paths with me that day went on to have a good summer.

For some reason, I can’t help but think about it from time to time.

Although it varies by species, cicadas spend most of their lives as nymphs underground.

For years, they live in the darkness of the soil, feeding on sap from tree roots, until finally emerging above ground.

And then, they emerge from their shells.

After spending so many years underground, they have only a few weeks to live above ground.

They wait for years, finally emerge into the world above, and yet the time they have left is surprisingly short.

They climb a tree, emerge from their shells, dry their wings, and take flight.

And then, they sing.

When you think about it, even that incredibly loud chorus lasts for only a brief period of their lives.

Perhaps that is why they sing with such determination.

As I spent my days thinking about such things, summer has already entered its final stretch.

And still, I can hear the cicadas.

There is only a little of this summer left.

Listening to the cicadas, I think I’ll enjoy this summer just a little longer.