Related story: Everything changes in 17 years ... except for the bugs

By John Mulligan
Journal Staff Writer

The return of the cicada was one of those topics that I just itch to get in print. The long lead time, 17 years or so, made it an ideal use of the Milk Box of column writing.

The technique calls more for the skills of the pack rat than the wordsmith. You simply take news clips on the topic as they arrive -- or random thoughts, or provisional lead paragraphs -- and put them in the box. The time to write is when the box fills up or the deadline hits, whichever comes first.

I started on my box last winter when I noted that the 2004 invasion was upon us. I read up on the bugs and stored clips but didn't write much before the creatures awoke, thinking that the story would be fresher if I wrote it in a sitting or two. My hope was to write fast the morning the cicadas arrived.

But other matters intruded. I pushed the bugs aside, knowing that the real deadline would be their expiration, which I faced with something like wistful dread, like the withering of the daffodils every spring, only worse.

Maybe the delay was helpful, as it let me study how my kids interacted with the insects in their own natural habitat, an experience that reminded me of reading The Lord of the Flies.

I had time for only one major fact-finding foray into the field, but this produced an exchange with my wife that rewarded the effort of rising with the bugs before dawn. Nancy's mother in Swansea, Mass., and her best friend up in Boston razzed her later to the effect that the passage rang satisfyingly true to her actual voice. Such are the guilty pleasures of column writing that we savor unbeknownst to the reader.

Anyhow, deadline did eventually loom with the slow quieting of the symphony that I had hoped would never end.

It seemed only right to begin composing my song to the bugs as they piped up for one of their last days above ground. So I got up in the dark with the cicadas, went outdoors and began to tap my fingers to their buzz.

I wish only to be vertical -- and still tapping -- when the cicadas return.