Membranes
The Movement of Containers, Perimeters, Exoskeletons and Skin
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I was thinking of membranes when I thought of you.
Membranes contain life, gather it in. They are pliable linings, moveable perimeters, layers of love. Containers, if you will. Without membranes, life is just a soup of ingredients. When they hold the messy bits (see them, love them), the messy bits spark. A container could be anything—a cell, a book, a room. A mantis, a mantle, a mug. Maybe an exoskeleton. But you know that.
Consider my kitchen table right this second: coffee in a mug, cantaloupe juice in a glass and garden variety vertigo in my head. I’m energized, hydrated and off-center. I have a notebook and a fast-writing pen. Plants surround me like a cocooning membrane, containing murmurings. My energy moves into the plants and boomerangs back into the page. I’m writing and I’m on a roll.
But not always. From time to time, creative energy goes dormant. I mourn it. But then I think of you, munching (mainlining) sap for 17 years, and I remember creativity is humming underground. Invisible. Sifting. Brooding.
In the dark soil, cicada nymphs are not even the final versions of themselves. They iterate, innovate, while moving through five stages. I found a nature video and the expert told me that when cicadas emerge and shed their exoskeleton, they “take on their true form.” He said it as a throw away line, no emphasis. But do they have a true form? Which one? The egg? The nymph in all its stages? The shell of skin left behind? The winged creatures above ground?
You know what’s what. You were always in transition, transforming. When your “true form” was 17 years away, what did you do with all that time? Suck it. The sap, I mean.
You were biding your time. Gestating something. 17 years of womb-hood, so to speak. 17 years ago, before I lived here, you were an egg on a branch of a maple tree (17 years smaller). I was 17 years younger, teaching dance to college students, feeling much older than those kids at 27. Seventeen years ago, you dropped two stories to the ground, riding on a chunk of a dead branch. You popped out of your egg knowing (how?) to dig into your underground bunker. The perfect hole. No one taught you that. I think of baby sea turtles ambling to the sea. Why? Déjà vu? What did you have? A checklist encoded with love?
Step 1: Fall from tree.
Step 2: Morph into a plucky form.
Step 3: Keep Morphing. And so on.
It’s written in the cells—a word, a seed, a something. Held together with a membrane. And the cells wait, growing. Like reproductive cells. They’re dormant but alive and ready to rock from the time before we are born. The next generation is there before the current one emerges. The goo, the imago of the caterpillar, butterfly-like. We are all of it. At all times.
We call to each other energetically. Whale songs through centuries. From rocks and elements to membranes and cells, we come into being. But we have always been. The same ingredients. And we know. An elemental knowing. A cellular knowing. We know to emerge when we feel the right amount of sunlight through soil. The sucking thirst of water’s first contact for a seedling. It’s a volcanic union, eons in the making. We know it’s time.
You dug a perfect hole and came out when you were good and ready.
The other day, I pulled a load of wet laundry out of the washer. As I grabbed a handful of clothes to toss into the dryer, an urgent electric squeak called out from inside the washer. The unmissable pop of your bold red eyes and gold-trimmed wings stood out loudly against wet clothes. Your alert was clear, “I am alive! A little help here?”
After my ear-splitting scream and full body shudder, I took you gently by the wings with heart pounding trepidation. Wrong? Right? How do I hold you under duress? Will you exact revenge? Will you know it was me, the (accidental) murderous laundress? You were the one who hitched a ride from outside, traveling under cover on a t-shirt to your doom in a laundry room.
But you survived. You made it too far to go in the garbage. My heart softened as I carried you upstairs.
Were you in there—the washer—holding on to the side like a Gravitron? A soapy, spinning cyclone? Did you resist? Did you let go and go with the flow? Drunk with fear? Stuck on survival? Maybe you needed a breather from the intensity of cicada business. The oversaturated dating pool. All that flying and bumping into things.
I placed you, squeaky clean, on the azalea.
And I thought I was having a day. During this year of survival, my practice has been teaching. Making connections. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I reach out as much as I can. Like building the muscle of the heart. A few students thank me and that is everything. They are seen and so am I. Sometimes seniors are asked about their legacy. “Hi there, Teenager-Just-Getting-By. What important thing will you leave behind?” I want to tell them, “So much. Everything. You are everything.”
I stand up from the table and pick browning leaves off of the fairy roots. That’s what I’ll call this little plant with tiny gnarled roots and delicate trailing leaves. I forget the name. The tag may have mentioned fairy gardens. Years ago, in my favorite nursery, I wandered green aisles, soft footsteps on soil. I happened upon the fairy roots (or they happened upon me).
The ancient soil in the container was compressed and moss-covered. Root bound, no doubt. The moss caught my eye. A miniature village! A little home to take home.
I sit back down. Coffee, cantelope juice, vertigo. Paper, pen, membranes. The memory of you. I remember my friend’s horoscope as a call to embrace “mess and magic.” Contain that electric squeak—a membrane for messy magic. Hoist it in the air with tender care. Life—if you continue on—creeps around and finds ways. Furiously, strangely.
Every day brings more dead cicadas. They pile up on lawns, sidewalks, everywhere. A few weeks ago, the kids collected the exoskeletons in paper bags. Now, everywhere you look—dead cicada carcasses. Or worse, the almost-dead. Their red eyes bulging in hyped-up horror. They appear silent and still until I walk too close. Then ZZZZT! These bugs on the brink cry out in a panic. The friction of their abdomen, their little…feelers? They feel. Such a ruckus.
The almost-dead skitter. Six legs, no more drive. Maybe you are one of them. Do you look up and mourn your former tree-topping self as you writhe on the sidewalk, not dodging dog walkers? Some still scream in trees. Some lay eggs, a kind of goodbye. They, too, will be dead by the time nymphs emerge and fall to the ground, full circle. A cycle. A ride on the Gravitron. I think again of the grown-up sea turtles booking it back to the water after all their digging. Do they turn around, legs spinning, to take a last glance? Is legacy on their mind? How about yours?
Think of a blanket of snow. Then think of the blanket of snow as a huge swathe of cicada carcasses, spread across the summer. The dead leave behind their bodies, their exoskeletons and their perfect holes in the ground. Later, when I am planting seeds, these exoskeletons, like membranes, come in handy.
I was thinking of membranes when I thought of you. What else can I say but thank you?
The seed of this essay was written during the summer of 2021, the year of Brood X.
A welcome sight for many East Coast fishermen.