A Memory

The Gift of Time
“The cicadas are singing intensely because they have only few weeks to live. They have to make most of their time.” My mother said to me as she thoughtfully looks out of her window.
My mother’s name is Rosita. Her soft snowy white hair is covering a portion of her intelligent face, which sometimes becomes puffy with all the medicines she’s taking. It is late afternoon and the cicadas are singing among the trees in my mother’s garden. The sound is deafening but they bring so many beautiful childhood memories for both of us. I come to visit her often in her modest home close to mine, which is surrounded with mangoes, coconuts, and other fruit bearing trees which she and my father planted when he was alive.
Today, she is sick, and my brother Carlos and I care for her.
She came back three months ago after spending four years under my sister’s care in California. Her health is failing now at the age of 81, but she insists to do her gardening despite of her kidney problems. This wonderful woman taught me how to paint at the age of three, and showed me many important things in life that I will always treasure.
Our mornings during childhood were always beautiful because she woke all of her four children with butterfly kisses. She retired many years ago after teaching grade school for more than thirty years. Her beautiful mind is now fading. She forgets everything you said in a few minutes and she asks the same question over and over again.
She remembers the past so vividly that I can paint her childhood in my mind. And today, she teaches me about this beautiful insect that can be found also in other countries like Australia and North America.
The cicadas sleep for about 17 years under the ground and live for only about four weeks above the ground and in the trees. They emerge for the first week, sing and mate for two weeks, and the last week is spent for laying eggs and dying.
Most of the cicadas don’t last that long, since the birds love them too, yet in those few weeks of life, these patient creatures have accomplished their purpose.
In my curiosity, I also found out that since the mothers won’t be there to take care of their young called nymphs, God made these “Nymphs” sleep through adulthood , more or less 13 to 17 years under the ground until they emerge again and live for less than a month. Yet their short existence never seemed to bother them. They sing songs and serenade their mates with the highest pitch possible.
Their life is too short for them to complain. The sounds are produced by the male adults as a mating call and also to distract the birds from eating them. The males will sing to the top of their tymbals, or a pair of ribbed membranes at the base of the abdomen and produce an intense noise beyond 120 dB , which can reach the pain threshold of the human ear at a close range. Other small species of cicadas produce higher pitch songs that it is beyond the range of our hearing.
What is more amazing is that the producer of this noise is protected by its own sound. The cicadas organs for hearing called the tympana, automatically closes so that it won’t be deafened by its own noise.
Experts are still researching on the mechanisms involved regarding the singing apparatus of the cicadas.
Our God made an amazing universe, that our human mind cannot fully comprehend. He reminds us once again that time is a gift. How long we live is not as important as how much we have lived.
“…you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.”-James 4:14