Cathy Barber on “Cicadas”

I spent the first ten years of my life in southeastern Ohio near Steubenville. At that time, it was named “the dirtiest city in the country,” a title earned by virtue of coal dust and factory output. Houses blackened with soot and homeowners hosed them down periodically to clean them like most people wash their cars. My father was an insurance salesman and my mother a housewife, so my family wasn’t dependent on a smog-creating industry for our livelihood, but we had a coal-burning furnace and a coal bin full of fuel to stoke the fire. We put out our share of soot. 

Mine was a typical childhood of the 1950s—lots of unsupervised outdoor play with the neighborhood kids—travelling via bikes; exploring yards, woods, a small swamp behind us, and the junkyard across the street; playing all the games of the era like “Kick the Can,” and “Relievio.” But our young lives were entwined with nature. For better, or often worse, we lived at ground level, picked up worms, caught lightning bugs, pulled legs off Daddy Long Legs and petals off flowers; scooped Crawdads and threw them back. We crawled under the bushes and up the trees. We knew the terrain and the roster of common creatures—when the unfamiliar cicadas arrived, they truly were an event. 

My dad, and possibly the whole neighborhood, called them Seven Year Locusts. The nomenclature was off, but the insects were fascinating—their sudden appearance in our lives; those two phases of shelled and unshelled; the slightly tinted, intricately-laced wings attached to military aircraft-shaped bodies. Their flight looked unlikely at best. And the sounds! They made crickets look like amateurs.

I’m a fan of pop culture, did my MFA thesis on the poetry of pop culture, so the superhero metaphor came very naturally to me. I liked Superman comics particularly, how Superman would dash off to stop an out-of-control train, then dash back, resume his identity as Clark Kent and accept the berating he got for missing something important. Those cicada shells somehow evoked a sudden departure.

Much of my work is autobiographical and I guess it goes without saying that this poem is as well. My dad followed the trail north for work, just like many others from southern Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky. Dad was happy to be nearer his sister, already in the area; the three of us kids adjusted quite quickly as kids do; but Mom never got over the move. She missed her sister, two brothers, a passel of nieces and nephews, all churchgoing strong believers. My sister and I grew progressively more problematic for her as the hippie era dawned and we were swept up in it, or rather leapt into it. We heard the music, we embraced the change, we felt we’d found our kin. Mom struggled with what we became. She longed for her old days and her extended family connections, but my sister and I joyfully headed for the new.