We’ve had almost two weeks of stable sunny weather, the kind of high-pressure clarity that makes every morning feel like a promise kept. The mountains stay sharp against blue sky, the lake holds its stillness well past noon, and the cicadas have settled into their rhythm.
They’re my accidental alarm clock, though they keep adjusting their schedule. A few weeks ago they started their electric chorus just after dawn, that rising buzz that cuts through sleep like a circular saw. But lately they’ve been sleeping in—ten minutes later each morning, maybe more. I’ve gained nearly a quarter-hour of quiet before the forest switches on its amplifiers.
It’s a small gift that comes with paying attention. Most people think cicadas just make noise, but they’re surprisingly precise about temperature and light. They need the air to hit a certain warmth before their flight muscles work properly, before they can drum their tymbals fast enough to generate that signature whine. Cool nights mean late starts. Clear skies mean predictable warming.
This morning I lay in bed listening to the forest wake up in layers. First the early birds—a crow’s territorial announcement, the liquid notes of a thrush. Then smaller sounds gathering like instruments tuning: leaf rustle, a distant truck on the mountain road, my neighbor’s dog stretching and jingling its collar. The cicadas came last, starting tentatively in the treetops, then building to that wall of sound that means serious summer has arrived.
There’s something almost industrial about their collective effort—thousands of males all vibrating their abdomens at once, trying to outcompete each other for female attention. The sound carries for kilometers, bounces off valley walls, turns the whole landscape into a concert hall. But it’s also strangely hypnotic, white noise that makes afternoon naps inevitable.
Scientists say different species peak at different times of day, which explains why the chorus changes pitch and intensity as hours pass. Morning cicadas give way to afternoon cicadas, then evening shift. It’s a carefully orchestrated schedule that most of us never notice, background music to summer that we tune out until it stops.
Yesterday I found one in the middle of its transformation—pale green and translucent, clinging to my deck railing while its old shell split down the back. The emerging cicada looked impossibly soft and vulnerable, nothing like the armored singers that fill the trees. Its wings were folded tight against its body like origami, and those huge dark eyes seemed to take in everything with the startled expression of someone waking up after a very long sleep.
Which, in a way, is exactly what was happening. This one had spent years underground as a nymph, tunneling through soil and tree roots, waiting for some mysterious internal timer to say “now.” Then the night climb up my railing, the careful split of its childhood skin, and this brief moment of being neither what it was nor what it would become.
By morning it would be brown and buzzing in the canopy above, adding its voice to the daily chorus. But for that hour at dusk, it hung there in transition—soft-bodied and silent, all potential energy waiting to harden into summer’s soundtrack.
When the cicadas do finally stop—during a sudden cold snap or at summer’s end—the silence feels enormous. You realize how much space that sound was filling, how it had become the acoustic signature of the season. Until then, I’m grateful for the extra sleep their temperature sensitivity provides, those few minutes of grace between night and the day’s electric beginning.