Emergence

Oops.

I… um. Forgot I had a blog?

I could claim that I use this space to write when I have something to say, and the world’s just so much of the same old that I came up blank repeatedly. Not quite true: there’s been rather a lot of news since the last quarter of 2020, and I could have reacted to it, but lots of others always got there ahead of me, those fast-twitch writers who can produce in the hours between one substantial news story and the next one that supersedes it. And then the news, thank God and Joe Biden, got a little slower, but I was out of the habit, or I really had nothing to say, or I might as well write if I’m going to write, and so forth. (The book is going well, by the way. I am in a bit of a slow patch just now, but that’s mostly because Spring, and because I have to write about politics again. Rose Franklin might have to try to postpone the election. Remember when we were talking about that? Around the last time I wrote something here?)

In fact, I’ve started posts many times, and just never finished them. And then it got to be a thing I couldn’t do, like so many other weird little roadblocks my brain has hit in the last year, such as listening to gardening podcasts (why?) or calling the doctor to schedule routine exams (I know, I should) or the perhaps-more-sensible Going Downtown. But we are reemerging, right, so here I am. One step at a time.

Halfway Through: A Coming-of-Age Story

Because I live in Cicada Central, I’ve been reading a lot of essays about how the emergence of Brood X is a parallel experience to ours as we come out of the pandemic, and I am just, well—no. Spending seventeen years underground and then coming out for a whirlwind bacchanal does seem weird to us, no doubt, but it’s completely normal to them. They are creatures of instinct and genetic determination, and so are we, but—not to be speciesist, but still—we have gone a bit beyond that, for better or worse. We are no longer simply weak apes who poop out seeds onto the ground and feed the trees when we die; we have foiled nature’s plan by inventing toilets and embalming, and we kill more than we eat, often because we are more afraid than threatened. We are afraid of things that won’t hurt us, like cicadas, and we aren’t afraid of things that can hurt us, like viral particles, and we get very mixed up with all the data input.

I am fully vaccinated, by the way (hurray!), and today I’m going to get into a car with someone not in my immediate family for the first time since March 12 of last year, and I think it will feel… normal? I suspect I’m underreacting to some of the aspects of reemergence, and overreacting to others, and part of the time these days I buzz around like one of our awkward bug friends and glom on to someone’s shoulder and forget how to let go. Though mostly I don’t. The pandemic has been easier on those of us who are fairly antisocial to begin with, there is no doubt. Please bear with us introverts if we don’t want to go to all the parties right away. Or ever. I am okay sitting on my quiet porch listening to other people shout happy greetings. There were things I liked about wearing a mask. (I’m still wearing them indoors, just to be polite; I pretty much stopped wearing them outdoors well before the CDC said it was okay, but where I live it’s quite possible to go for a walk even not in the woods and barely see another person, as though I was in a Story of Future Suburbia and about to be stopped by the police for anti-American strolling. And at the very least we could step off the sidewalk and measure the mental six-foot distance that’s now locked into our synapses, without being hit by a passing car, like a cicada snapped up by a bird.)

There are people who won’t visit this blog post because it has a Big Freaking Bug on it; there are people who aren’t going outside right now for the same reason. This is irrational, but understandable. There are also people who are spraying the cicadas with toxic chemicals that will also poison anything that tries to eat them (because of instinctual hunger or because it makes a great Instagram post), and that is just ignorant. There’s a difference, and it’s not just a difference like between awkward though harmless cicadas and determined and dangerous yellow jackets, both of which are just doing what they are designed to do. We don’t kill fellow creatures only because they might kill us first, though we often convince ourselves that’s what is bound to happen. We didn’t spend a year that feels like seventeen years underground because a virus came out of nowhere and laid us low. With no knowledge and no defenses, it might have been an actual seventeen years; it also could have been a few months. We survived because of science, and we came out worse than we might have because of politics, and you can probably find examples of the reverse as well. But ignorance never makes it better. There, that’s what I would have said over the last seven months if I’d managed to write it down. Go read up about 17-year cicadas if you’re afraid of them; they are fascinating, and fascination sometimes provokes horror, but often it produces love. This is the third emergence I’ve been in this region for; this time around, I am awkwardly charmed. I’ll miss them a bit when they’re gone.

I hope I will find other things to talk about here! The book I am writing, and books I didn’t write, and maybe some gardening podcasts. Be seeing you.