Every 17 years, I dread this time. It was bad enough the first time I remember seeing them as a young adult. I lived in a midrise apartment complex at the time. I still remember darting with a screech from the building, to the sidewalk, to my where my car was parked.

It’s been a lot worse since then.

I’m a homeowner now and live in a neighborhood with an abundance of mature trees. And cicadas love mature trees.

Have you ever seen the Alfred Hitchcock movie, The Birds, or any movie resembling plagues of locusts or grasshoppers? That’s what it’s like when they come to my neck of the woods.

Maybe if they weren’t so clumsy and had better eyesight, it wouldn’t be so bad. Yes, it would. Their sheer number is what bothers me the most. And anything with a rough texture they gravitate to, not just trees. The houses in my neighborhood are primarily brick so the cicadas hand onto them, also underneath the canopies of trees and on the grass. They are, dare I say, juicy, so there’s a nasty sensation when you step on them.

Many will die off before they fly on to wherever they go off to, so you are then stuck with sweeping them up and discarding them. They stink if you decide to allow them to biodegrade where they drop and depending on the number of them, you’ll ultimately decide to remove them. Neither choice is a particularly enjoyable one.

As a homeowner, I’ve dealt with snakes, a bat and other kinds of wildlife. But none of them (well, maybe the bat flying around in my bedroom) has given me the anxiety I experience with cicadas. I think that it is due to the number of them as well as their duration in my neighborhood.

Leaving my house became almost impossible for me to do the last time they were here. Mowing the lawn became beyond difficult, nearly paralyzing. I recall asking a friend to do it once because I couldn’t.

I’m glad that they only come around every 17 years, although I recall two appearing a few years ago. They were members of another brood but I nearly had a heart attack when I cam upon one of them, although they appeared to be smaller than the ones that overtook my neighborhood in 2004.

I’d planned to leave this area and go somewhere else until I was told that the coast was clear but then the pandemic happened and threw a monkey wrench into my plans. You want to talk about mad! I had been thinking about it off and on since the cicadas previous arrival–let’s just say, a long time. Where was I going? Any state where they were not!

So, what about you? Do they bother you? And will they be coming to your state or neighborhood this year?