The Wine Widow on Cicadas, Hornets and Nuns
This year, in America, two broods of cicadas have emerged together for the first time since 1803: Brood 19 which appears every 13 years and Brood 13 which pops up every 17 years. When they appear in the same place at the same time, such as Illinois, the noise was so loud that locals called the police. I know this because I bought the Junior Week by mistake at Waterloo and it was my only reading material on a broken down train that stranded it’s passengers for over an hour somewhere near Basingstoke. A long time after finishing it, I went to put my empty coffee cup in the bin – as an outing – where a woman was sitting on the floor feeding a rabbit lopping about by her feet.
I think about the cicadas because the kitchen has begun to drone alarmingly with hornet upon hornet. They are enormous, they are scary, and they are very noisy. “Hornets are not aggressive” Zam tells me as I discuss ways to exterminate them. “And they’re having a very bad time. The wasps have taken over their nest in the shed” he adds, as though this will convince me where my sympathies should lie. “I’M having a very bad time” I shout as one gets stuck in my hair.
I then remember the woman with the rabbit and how I mentioned this to the two women I had befriended as we discussed ways to get off the train. “I think I’m in a dystopian nightmare,” I said. “There’ll be a nun with a guitar next” one of them replied.
Zam comes home worried about record breaking rain, September sun, weirdly cold nights, violent storms … weather. “And spotted wing drosophila” he adds. Oh DEAR, I try to sound sympathetic as I hoover up hornets that have died of natural causes near the sink. On the floor. And most window ledges. No sign of a singing nun yet though.
