Weekend essay: Cicada signs

The “sign” has returned – those seasonal cicadas. The first few could be heard the other night while lounging on the front-porch glider.
There was that telltale cross between a click-click-click-click, a chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp and late Pittsburgh Mayor Sophie Masloff, imitating Mike Lange, the radio voice of the Penguins. You know the line — Sophie talked about scratching her back with a hacksaw.
First there was one cicada. Then another answered the mating call. Then there were a few more. Next came a chorus. In a matter of weeks, the cacophony will arrive.
Though summer has just entered its second third, the cicadas are a harbinger that summer, despite what the Beach Boys insisted, is not endless. Change is nigh.
Even though the bean and pepper harvest are in perfect midseason form and the first tomatoes are just coming in, gardeners are contemplating what to sow for fall harvest.
Though the vacation season is at its zenith, moms and dads and kids alike know August will bring that back-to-business and back-to-school transition.
And all those home projects delayed – why do today what you can put off until tomorrow? – really will have to be tackled before the fall of life intercedes.
The song of the cicadas seems to cement all these coming realities, among many others. Insert yours here.
Back on the glider, a fiery sun is about to set on one of the hottest days of the year. There’s a rumble of what sounds like thunder but what’s more likely a jet taking off. And the cicadas, more of them and ever louder, are at it again.
One of the big robins caring for a new brood in a nest high atop the backyard crab apple appears delighted to have found a cicada clinging to the side of the front-yard silver maple.
It pecks and pecks but, “Drats!” it surely says, there’s nothing to be had. Clan Robin will be disappointed; a newly shed exoskeleton, now on the ground, will feed none.
Cicadas also are supposedly a sign of something else, it once was written — the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
On this night, in this place, there certainly appear to be a lot of very vocal and frustrated poet souls.
Colin McNickle is a senior fellow and media specialist at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).