Like red-eyed emissaries from another planet, cicadas started appearing in my garden this week. I first spotted exoskeletons—the empty brown “skins” left behind when they emerge—on leaves as I was weeding. I wondered if these were leftovers from last year, but I kept finding more and more of them. It didn’t take long to stumble across the former inhabitants of those exoskeletons lurking under my plants. Cicadas are big and skittish, and though they don’t fly far, they can startle when they take to the air. It seems a bit early for their emergence, and I wondered why there are so many of them off the 17-year cycle. Apparently I’m not the only one puzzling over the problem, as this article from the Washington Post makes clear. Cicadas don’t live long, so when one of them landed on me I walked with it into the house and set it up in my studio for a posterity portrait. It was surprisingly cooperative, though it followed my movements with those eerie red eyes. After a few quiet moments, it decided it had had enough attention and started to walk away. I released it, indignant but unharmed, into the rhododendron.