Exuviae
In the summers of my childhood, I would spend some weeks with my father in a college town nestled in the pines of East Texas. The house he shared with my grandmother had a sloping yard with spilling roils of ivy that led on one side into the untamed forest, where patchy grass and gopher burrows gave way sharply to the crunch of dried pine needles blanketing sandy soil underfoot. Walking through the forest was a thrill. Each journey was a test of how far in I would dare to go before the threat of its many dangers — the poison ivy and venomous insects I definitely saw, the mountain lions and snakes I imagined lurking out of sight — sent me scrambling back to the safety of the yard I knew. At the height of summer, the trees would sing with a chorus of cicadas, the sighing rattle of lonely males piercing the heavy, humid air under the Texan sun.
Rare was the opportunity to see adult cicadas alive, crawling slowly, heavy as stones, unpredictably docile before launching into flight with sudden urgency. Most of what I saw of the cicadas was in the lives they’d left behind: shells of their juvenile bodies, brittle husks split down the back, hooked legs still grasping to the spot where they molted. As a kid obsessed with insects, finding the perfectly preserved exoskeleton of such a strange species was like discovering a jewel left out in the open. It was an auspicious summer when I could gather not one but a collection of these exuviae to admire.
The cicada’s metamorphosis is an altogether different image from the more widely taught caterpillar-butterfly lifecycle and more…