How old are you in cicada years?

AP file

I’ll turn 4 years old this year.

That’s in cicada years.

The appearance of the 17-year cicadas this year will mark the fourth emergence of the red-eyed, orange-veined creatures in my lifetime — thus, my fourth cicada birthday.

While much of the focus is typically on the insects’ "deafening din" as we used to call it, I've always been most intrigued by their timetable — that internal clock that puts 17 years between each brood.

They mate, lay their eggs in the trees, and the hatched larvae tumble to the ground and bury themselves in the dirt, where they sit for 17 years until they rise in the next blaze of noisy, surreal, magical glory.

Life goes on between broods. Presidents come and go. Wars are won or lost. Pandemics rage and dwindle. Hearts are stirred and broken. Babies are born and grow into teenagers.

The cicadas are oblivious to all that.

We, of course, are not.

I've always felt a special tie to the 17-year cicadas. They put me on the front page of the Sun-Times.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. That was on my second cicada birthday.

My first cicada birthday was in 1973. Richard Nixon was in the White House, Richard J. Daley was in City Hall, and I was heading toward high school.

The world was brand-new to those cicadas, but I was a sophisticated adolescent. I'd already enjoyed my first kiss — and heartbreak — and graduated from grade school.

That summer, our family went to a cookout in the forest preserves, and we couldn't escape the cicadas' drone from the trees. We didn't hear much of that noise around our house. A couple of summers before that, my dad had cut down most of the trees around our two-flat in West Lawn, so there was nowhere for the cicadas to perch. But honestly, the buzz of that chainsaw echoes in my memory much louder than the cicadas of ’73.

Riding cicada wings to Page 1, and beyond

By my second cicada birthday in 1990, high school was a distant memory. So was Nixon. George Bush was in the White House. (We didn't call him George H.W. Bush yet.) Richard M. Daley was now in City Hall. (We did need the middle initial for him.)

As for me, I'd rebounded wonderfully from that 8th grade heartbreak. I'd already found the love my life, and we'd bought a home the year before for the two of us and my stepson. I’d been at the Sun-Times for a dozen years and had scored a reporting internship at the paper that year.

They made me "the cicada reporter" that summer of ‘90. We set up a "Cicada Hotline," an old answering machine hooked up to a phone in a corner of the newspaper’s morgue. I remember interviewing a grandmother who'd stashed cicadas in her freezer back in '73 to show her grandkids in '90.

I rode those cicada wings right onto the front page, earning my first solo Page 1 byline when they finally made their debut.

"They’re heeere," I wrote on the June 2 front page.

By my third cicada birthday in 2007, George W. Bush was in the White House. Richard M. Daley was still in City Hall. OK, maybe some things don’t change all that much between cicada broods.

But lots had changed for me. My stepson had married. My wife and I were grandparents, twice over. We'd also added a beagle named Boo to our little brood. At the Sun-Times, I had moved up from cicada reporter to political reporter and soon would be promoted to political editor.

My strongest cicada memory from that year is listening to their chorus in the trees outside a restaurant in the near western suburbs. We had gone out for some family celebration. My youngest sister, Robin, was upset — disabilities had made her life challenging, and she was depressed. I remember sitting outside the restaurant with her, the cicada buzz providing her a pleasant distraction. My sister laughed and smiled as we talked about the strange visitors and life itself.

Now, it’s my fourth cicada birthday.

Joe Biden is in the White House, and Brandon Johnson is in City Hall. Sadly, Mom, Dad and my sister Robin are no longer here to see or hear this brood. Boo isn’t around to bark at the noisy trees. But our family has grown in other ways, with two more grandchildren and our first great-granddaughter.

I’ve moved on from politics to breaking news. The cicada beat is in good hands with Mary Norkol, whose hands are especially full with the overlapping emergence of the 17-year cicadas up here and a 13-year variety in southern Illinois.

As for this great-grandfather, I’ll be content to take out the memories I have stashed away and look forward to building some new ones to cherish on my next cicada birthday. I hear your fifth birthday is a big one.

Thanks, cicadas, for showing us how to pack so much into life, no matter how long it is.

Scott Fornek is a breaking news editor at the Chicago Sun-Times. This column is part of our occasional "Meet the Sun-Times" series introducing readers to editors and other staff.