Cicadas are back! What? There are two broods? Put in your industrial strength ear plugs

One of the joys of my life is to spend spring and summer evenings on the screened porch of my home in Monteagle, Tennessee, listening to a serenade of chirping crickets. It is music to my ears.

I am like the old man who was sitting on his porch alongside his wife on a summer night, enjoying the sound of the crickets while, unbeknownst to him, his wife was enjoying the sound of a choir singing in a church nearby.

“Isn’t that beautiful?“ asked his wife, referring the sound of the choir.

“Yes it is!” replied the old man thinking she was referring to the crickets, adding, “And to think they do that by rubbing their hind legs together!”

But my joy of listening to crickets rubbing their hind legs together may soon be drowned out by the cacophonous noise of another group of insects, the cicadas .

Crickets are musical, but cicadas are just loud

In stark and loud contrast to crickets, cicadas do not make beautiful music. They make deafening ear-piercing screams as the male cicadas flex their muscles on their tiny abdomens attempting to draw the attention of female cicadas.

The roaring sound of a male cicada has been estimated to be as loud as 90 to 100 decibels.

That is as loud as an operating lawn mower if you can imagine not one but hundreds of lawn mowers cutting the grass in your front and back lawn 24 hours a day for weeks.

The cicadas emerge every 13 to 17 years, usually from mid-May to late June which means they should arrive en masse in Tennessee in the next couple of weeks.

And there will be trillions (yes, trillions!) of them this year making the loudest noise ever.

Bill Haltom: My Democratic father and Republican mother loved each other. Would that work out today?

Beware, "Cicadageddon" is upon us in Tennesseee

There are two broods of cicadas, Brood XIX and Brood XIII, and they generally do not emerge together. Brood XIX arises from the underground every 13 years. Brood XIII emerges and screams every 17 years. Each brood can make howling noise. Fortunately they seldom form a duet.

But this spring for the first time since 1803, both broods will emerge together from the underground and create what is being called “Cicadageddon”!

The cicadas should complete their love songs and return to underground hibernation by the Fourth of July. They will be replaced in the night skies by brief and relatively quiet fireworks displays and the return of the sweet symphonies of crickets along with an  accompanying choreography of lightening bugs.

But until then I will trying to locate some industrial strength ear plugs, and insert them squarely in the sides of my head.

Bill Haltom is an author who resides in Memphis and Monteagle. He is the author of "Why Can’t Mother Vote? Joseph Hanover and the Unfinished Business of Democracy."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Cicadas are back! What? There are two broods? Put in your industrial strength ear plugs