Snailboat, Snail Away

The neighborhood I grew up in is surreal and ugly, pockmarked by designer mansions amidst little Cape Cod style homes and tiny mutants, livable sheds with addition after addition put on. There is a trail I used to walk, which was adoringly named The Cicada Walk, that I frequented as a child with my grandmother. I was very young. She’d walk in the middle of the street - there were a lot fewer people driving around at that time - and I’d flutter from tree to tree, both sides of the street, swirling around their bark, looking for callow cicadas who hung limply from crackling paper shells. Cicadas are those bugs that, all summer long, go wra-wra-wra-wra-wra in the trees. They’re fat and slovenly, slow and gross, like couch potatoes with wings. When they reproduce, the babes live in the ground for a long time, something like 15 years, and then they come out, en masse, and climb trees with their tough little crab bodies. They don’t go wra-wra-wra-wra-wra yet. They climb up and sit, and eventually, they burst out of their carapaces, and, while their wings dry and harden, they hang from the tree like a piece of old celery. They’re very ugly throughout every phase of their lifecycles.