Do you remember what you were doing 13 years ago? Most people won't remember. I surely remember....Summer 1998.
I was still in school & moved to Columbia, MO for the summer to do a clinical rotation. A classmate & I moved from Southern Illinois with our belongings, as much as our cars could fit, & moved here for the summer. Neither one of us had ever visited Columbia before. We planned to stay in a furnished apartment. We moved into an apartment complex & quickly discovered it was roach infested! We tried moving to another apartment within the building but again, more roaches.
We didn't know what to do, so we moved to a hotel for about a week until we figured something out. We met a ton of people at the hospital & a guy we worked with offered his apartment to us.
He had an extra bedroom we could rent from him. We had no other options, so we moved in.
BUT, that's not what I remember most about the Summer of 1998
CICADA INVASION!!!!
Cute little creatures, right?
They were everywhere! You couldn't walk 2 feet without being hit by their hard, crunchy body. Dead cicadas covered the sidewalks. Dead cicada guts on your windshield.
At the time, I didn't realize it was a cicada invasion. I remember thinking I'm never coming back to this town.
Thirteen years, later, here I am, living in Columbia. It never crossed my mind that I would begin my career & my adult life here in Mid Missouri.
They're back....
After 13 years of hibernating, they've emerged and they're loud...they can be as loud as 100 dB (like a rock concert)!
Cicadas come up from the ground every 13 years and flock to the trees. They're known for being noisy making their mating sound. When the eggs hatch the baby cicadas crawl back underground to hibernate for another 13 years.
The cicadas do not sting or bite and the season peaks in Mid-June. One expert claims that in heavily wooded areas there may be more than a million cicadas per acre.
There's no way to avoid these bugs, they're everywhere. It's the talk of the town right now.
Especially this story....
Check it out
Unfortunately, I was not one of the lucky taste testers.
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