My son loved the cicadas. I’m finally ready to love them again.

The next time they came, in 2004, I was a young mother with a 5-year-old and an almost 3-year-old, and by then I’d been disabused of any notion that life was all about me. The days in the farmhouse were long gone, my mother having died the very next summer. So great were my children’s needs and so intense their emotions, it often felt like there was barely anything left of me, let alone the 17-year-old I’d once been. Young Jack and Margaret had stolen my heart and my sleep, and we spent relentlessly long days looking for ways to pass the time as my husband worked almost nonstop.