Member-only story

Exuviae

Matt Becher
4 min readAug 22, 2021

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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 fascinating for its details. Underground nymphs with gnarled limbs drain sap from trees for years, breaching the soil in the night to crawl out onto trees and walls before bursting out of themselves, sleek armored bodies capped with membranous alien wings preparing for the final phase of adulthood. Their lives were delightfully dark and weird. I was thrilled by their strangeness.

The year I turned 13 was the first summer without my grandmother. The house wasn’t the same in her absence. Her bedroom became a guest room with a computer where I would often stay when I visited. Being a teenager in the early aughts, I spent more time on the computer and less time outside. I never entirely lost interest in bugs, but there were more pressing teenage matters to attend to. Jockeying for popularity on online forums and navigating the influx of hormones and questions about sex and adulthood replaced the joy of childhood play and the quiet beauty of the forest. Some years…

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Matt Becher
Matt Becher

Written by Matt Becher

Arts fundraiser, illustrator, and freelance writer. Featured on Esquire.com, Fatherly, and others. Three-time @quora Top Writer. http://www.mattbecher.com

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