For weeks, we can’t go outside without the cicadas’ song wrapping itself around the three of us like a quilt. The tree in our front yard has become their sanctuary, a place where they all seem to congregate and sing their first and final songs. We get closer, and see the way their exoskeletons ornament the bark like golden ghosts, shadows abandoned by their bodies searching for new life. One of you is four years old. One of you is two. The next time the cicadas rise out of the earth you will be twenty-one and nineteen. I think of how much might change between these cycles. How much of our
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