Caitlin Theron

RUNNER UP

Sun Bugs

Christmas came screaming down the dirt lane on the farm. It sang in the shrubs along the brick walls of our home. Christmas beetles, or sun bugs as my mum always called them, were so loud they seemed to swallow their surroundings. The Southern African holiday heralders.

In the height of summer, the unmistakable screech of sun bugs not only meant Christmas cake and the resin smell of yellowwood and tinsel, but the beginning of blessings to come. By December, the sound of cicadas, as I’ve come to learn they are called, had woven its way into the fabric of the season. Within the first week of their noisy arrival, silence began to feel wrong. You no longer questioned their presence; you lived inside it.

In the UK, Christmas seems to arrive quietly. The cosy, muffled tranquillity you see in Christmas films. Crackling fires, snow and warm light. But ours was radiant and unrelenting. The sun’s weight buckled the land, and the heat shimmered across the dusty horizon. Within the shrubbery and trees, the bugs screamed, ceasing their hibernation and demanding to be heard. Towering over the hum of birdsong in the garden and the rhythmic pulse of mbira music down the track, the sun bugs held us to our home, calling us back year after year

Dad described them in a way I hadn’t thought of before. “The rains are bound to come soon, and the sun bugs will let Mwari know”, he would say to me in a hushed tone at my bedside. Followed by “the louder they sing, the closer Santa Claus is", and I’d smile and beg for that to be true. For him, a man who saw the world through seasons and soils, sun bugs signalled a promise. Rain. Relief, if we hoped hard enough. When the farm struggled, we did too, Dad the most. Mum’s positive twist and childlike nickname for an otherwise infuriating creature gave him the hope he so desperately searched for each year. The sun bugs felt like millions of tiny messengers telling us, from somewhere just beneath the surface, that everything was going to be ok.

Of course, not everyone viewed them as entirely charming creatures. They were utterly relentless. Stuck in your hair with their prickly legs, climbing inch by inch up your arm, consuming even the most silent of thoughts you hoped to have to yourself. They scratched along the tin roof of our home, creating a noise I can only describe as being felt in your teeth. I’d lie awake late at night, delirious, driven mad by their constant droning. The only way to escape their incessancy was through humour. In a place overcome with uncertainty, it became something we clung to. I once heard them described as Mariah Carey’s spirit animal, and another person claimed, wholeheartedly, that their scientific name was, indeed, a party beetle. And it felt true. They marked the beginning of celebration, but simultaneously the start of three months of torture.

In Zimbabwe and Mozambique, they weren’t just heard. They were gathered, shared, cooked, and eaten. A gift from the soil, a similar opinion to Dad's. They always appeared when they were needed most. I remember first thinking how strange and unappealing it sounded to eat them, creatures that were impossible to escape and ignore, being something you held in your hands and shared with your family and friends willingly and happily.

It wasn’t just noise and the weather to us. Other things sat in the air alongside them. The kind of things that your teenage brain can’t fully comprehend, but your twenty-three-year-old one is beginning to. Words like insurgency, spoken cautiously or not at all. Malaria, which arrived violently and left Mum with her face in her hands and her fists clenched tight. A reminder that life could be full, yet fleeting; fulfilling, yet fragile.

In retrospect, sun bugs have become something larger to me in my adulthood. They’ve served as a metaphor for something so beautiful that lives only in a place that still feels like home, thousands of kilometres away. They were everyone’s. Shared. Admired. They held different meanings to different people, but they remained embedded in everything. In places where separation defined life, these tiny, noisy, little bugs moved through the same air, screeched no matter who heard and found you, whether you looked for them or not. They had a wonderful way of making very large gaps feel incredibly small.

I feel tethered to my home through the smallest things now. Sun bugs steady me. I didn’t really think I needed to be tethered or steadied till I had left. They have come to mean more than I had ever thought back then. In a quiet, unassuming way, they are my adult reminder to stop and observe, to appreciate and soak in. They’ve taught me that as you move through the world, your identity ebbs and flows and can’t be carried perfectly or defined quickly. It lives in what we hear, in the heat, in the ways we anticipate things before they happen or won’t happen at all.

And yet, year after year, the sound we all grew to love comes back. Unchanged and unbothered. As if nothing else in the world mattered.

I think that’s why it means so much to me now.

I had always dreamt of a white, cosy Christmas, far, far away from heat and uncertainty. I live in the UK now, opportunities are bigger, and dreams are more within reach, but the unfamiliarity of my new, quiet Christmas reminds me of what I’m missing. A warm hug from Mum, Dad’s tormenting jokes, the smell after the first rains on the gum tree forest down the road. All things that make me who I am rolled into the screeching, drowning noise of a little sun bug.