Greetings from the bosom of Brood X.

I am embedded in the occupying horde, long before daybreak in the suburban woods of northern Virginia.

A million cicadas in darkness are pure sound, a roaring hum with a hint of clatter in it, so well-tuned to the season it seems impossible they've ever been away, let alone buried for a generation.

I loll back on my foldable Coleman camp chair (lighter, sturdier and five times more expensive than anything on the market in 1987) and remember.

Seventeen springs ago, the day of the "locusts" came just after my wife and I, married less than a year, moved from a studio apartment in D.C. to our first house, an old converted summer cottage across the Potomac.

Mel Gibson was riding the first of the Lethal Weapon movies to superstardom.

Another celebrity, Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North, was rising out of President Ronald Reagan's Iran-contra scandal.

Cyndi Lauper and Los Lobos were on the pop music charts. Wade Boggs and Roger Clemens notwithstanding, the American League Champion Red Sox were in an epic swoon.

In the House of Representatives, an up-and-coming firebrand named Newt Gingrich was calling the internal probe of Rhode Island's Fernand J. St Germain "the biggest whitewash of the '80s." Freddie scoffed.

I was headed for a campaign junket to Texas, having sold my bosses on the preposterous idea that the local guy, Michael Dukakis, would be the Democratic presidential nominee in just over a year.

Nancy and I bought a golden-haired puppy, who chased cicadas around the patio and ate them on the wing. Our world was alive with bugs, the grass actually throbbing before our eyes, the beasties crunching under every footstep.

They arose, molted, mated and threw a litter of billions in three weeks' time. The young burrowed in for a 17-year nap and suddenly the music stopped dead.

I take another sip of espresso (home-brewed in the Mr. Coffee mini-steamer that my brother and sister-in-law FedExed from California for Christmas) and soak up the humid predawn heat, the honeysuckle scent, the love song tuned to some kind of celestial time signature.

All these years, the larvae of Brood X, the 10th brood, as it's known to entomologists, have lain under my crabgrass, through wars in Iraq and the Balkans, Bill Clinton's impeachment, the rise of the Farrelly brothers and the World Wide Web, the fall of heavy metal, Cheers and Gov. Ed DiPrete.

Along the way our own offspring began to show up at the house. We discovered all kinds of strange colonies teeming under our nose: birth lessons, preschool, T-ball, Scouts, band camp, skateboard park. We put a succession of minivans through the equivalent of 13 circumnavigations of the globe.

Alarmingly, our house began to shrink, so we built an addition.

Which made me realize in dismay as the 17th spring approached: it wasn't just the evil developers and their hideous McMansions that were destroying the planet. Cicadas beyond number had been killed as they slept in our yard.

Their blood (or at least a lot of that yellow stuff) was on my hands!

Indeed when the awakening came last month our regraded back lot was still.

But out front, thank goodness, the miracle was right on time. Practically overnight, the bulletholes opened, dozens to the square yard, as the nymphs broke out of the ground and crawled into the trees to shuck their skin and start romancing.

A hundred caramel-colored husks hung one morning from the leaves on the redbud we planted for Mother's Day of Ought-One, more from the boughs of our gnarled dogwood. Soon the bugs were everywhere.

A famous lepidopterist once said his pastime made him feel "a sense of oneness with stone and sun." For me, drowsing through the wee hours on a wave of insect mating calls, it's more like oneness with the dark and the dirt.

Still, I can relate. And by daylight, my cicadas are as beautiful as his butterflies: heads like black helmets with popping orange eyes, striated bodies as big as three bumblebees, heavy-veined wings refracting the sun like stained-glass.

But the warrior pose disintegrates when the cicada gets airborne. The labored whirring, the drunken flight path, the frequent crackups (on your windshield, your pantleg, the side of your head) all point to a weakness in survival sense as well as brainpower.

But boy do they make up for it in numbers, noise and libido.

Just before sunrise, my first firefly of the spring winks on. The pale dots connect to make a jagged line in my mind's eye. The cicadas' drone connects backward, I imagine, in 17-year dots of timeline until they reach Noah. They had to come after the Flood, right?

I press the green phone icon on my new cellular and dial home by blue screen's glow.

"Hello?"

"Good morning, darling. Can you hear anything?"

"Hunh?"

"I'm in the woods up at the high school. Can you hear the cicadas?"

"Oh God. Do you know what time it is, you idiot?"

"No, listen. It suddenly came to me what they sound like. Don't you think it's like a continuous waterfall of periwinkles? A billion teeny-tiny seashells clicking?"

"This is so ridiculous. They sound like a spaceship getting ready to land. They're going to take you away with them. I'm hanging up now. Good night."

My wife thinks they're totally cool, period. But I want to know why. I think it may be their rhythmn of feast or famine. One day they're everyplace -- at least inside the oval on the map that covers a stretch of the Eastern Seabord. Next day they have disappeared from the face of the earth. Plus, they're so much more interesting than a total eclipse.

Example: A third-grader in my house taught me how to sex the beasts. Hold the wings together like this between your forefinger and thumb, Kathleen instructed. Put the cicada beside your ear, tail-first.

"Hear anything?" asked her little sister, Lucy.

"Why yes. I heard a wet tapping sound like a phlegmy baby coughing in the next room."

"It's a boy!" the girls screamed.

Teenaged boys, of course, lack that kind of subtlety. Last week, I watched a group -- all from decent families and semi-civilized, despite two years of middle school -- taken over by death lust. They danced around a field, scooping cicadas into piles. They set upon them with sticks. They stomped them into mass graves. Howling with evil glee, the boys tormented one another with the insects' oozing thoraxes and torn-off heads.

Some bold fifth-graders I know (mates on a team known fittingly as the Grasshoppers) executed a cicada-testing pact before practice the other day.

In unison, the girls plucked captives from the grass. In unison, they pulled off wings and legs. In unison they tasted:

"One, two, three. . . ."

"Eeeyioou!"

"They're crunchy!"

Seventeen years ago, the bugs were announced and explained by a few matter-of-fact articles in the newspaper. The rage for them -- and for eating them -- spread by word of mouth. The recipe of choice, looking back on it, was quaint: Cicadas stir-fried in a wok.

I had planned to scour the cast-iron skillet when the time came for the Brood X feast. But I'm starting to think they deserve preparations fit for the age of the Web and 24-7 cablevision.

I'm thinking microwave.

John E. Mulligan is the Washington Bureau Chief of The Providence Journal. He can be reached by e-mail at jmulligan@belo-dc.com.