Word: cicada
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Scientists speculate that the periodic cicada's infrequent but abundant above-ground appearance is a survival strategy. Predators cannot thrive on a dinner that shows up so seldom, and the cicadas' sheer numbers guarantee that even though individuals are easy to catch, many will survive...
Some also claim that the cicada's peculiar, burning, raspy song, produced by a pair of ribbed membranes at the sides of the male's abdomen, is irritating to predators. That seems fanciful, but perhaps it is true because people are uncommonly cross about cicadas and complain that their song is nerve-racking. In Missouri, these days, it is constant and pervasive. The cicadas have three things to say. One is a steady, insistent, buzzy trill: zs-zs-zs-zs-zs. It is a background to a more varied kee-o-keeeee-o-kee-o that punctuates the steady drone...
...eaten by predators or squashed and dusted with poison by humans. But most survive, and the female is able to lay upwards of 500 eggs in slits that she makes in twigs. The lives of the adults are soon over, and they die. But in eight weeks the cicada nymphs hatch and burrow down into the ground to reach the tree roots, on which they will feed and grow slowly for the next 13 years. The periodic cicadas do not kill trees in their feeding, and at no point in their lives do they hurt garden vegetables or flowering plants...
...Provence presented itself as a museum of the prototypes of strong sensation: blazing light, red earth, blue sea, mauve twilight, the flake of gold buried in the black depths of the cypress; archaic tastes of wine and olive, ancient smells of dust, goat dung and thyme, immemorial sounds of cicada and rustic flute-"O for a beaker full of the warm South!" In such places, color might take on a primary, clarified role. Far from the veils and nuances of Paris fog and Dutch rain, it would resolve itself into tonic declaration-nouns that stood for wellbeing. Such, at least...