We’re having another winter storm in Seattle. All day, I’ve watched the wind manhandle the trees in my neighborhood. Our power has flickered repeatedly, as if it’s flirting with the notion of going out entirely. Now hail is clinking (make that clanking, since the hail is getting larger) against our home’s gutters and windows. I just moved my car to the bottom of our hill, which means I should at least have a shot at making it to the GRE testing center tomorrow morning, when the weather is supposed to be even worse than it is now.

When I got out of my car after safely nestling it on a side street at the foot of the hill, I noticed a familiar sound. At first, I thought it was cicadas, but there aren’t any cicadas here. Even if there were, they wouldn’t be out this time of year. Still, the momentary misimpression of hearing them stirred something in me—a longing for the Midwest, for late-night walks down quaint, flat streets, the bark of the oaks and elms and maples and magnolias covered with them. The surround-sound of them above us, beside us, near and far. Every morning, the rattling was gone. Then at dusk, they’d start up with their modulated drone, vibrating their tymbals and turning their bodies into diminutive chambers of sound.

But I digress. The sound, as I was saying, wasn’t cicadas. It was the hail. I’m not sure how hail created that kind of din, but it did. While I walked back up the hill to my house, shielded from the hail by my umbrella, I felt happy as I thought about the joy of plucking abandoned cicada exoskeletons from branches and tree trunks, something I relished as a child in Oklahoma and as an adult in Kansas City. (Aaah, the wonder of their split-open backs, banded abdomens and finely haired bodies. Their alien eyes. Their hunched posture. Their clawed and crooked front arms. And oooh, how lithe they must be to crawl out of such a thin casing without destroying it. And wow, the thought of them rising up out of themselves—soft-bodied with pale-gold wings and red eyes and black bands on top of their heads—and wafting on the breeze like miniature German flags.)

But I also felt sad about moving so far away from them, both in terms of distance and, increasingly, time. As more time passes, I will forget about cicadas (and all the other details of my old Midwestern life), recalling them less often and with less specificity than I do now. One day, I will hear hail that sounds just like those ugly little racket-makers, and I won’t even make the connection.

But that’s what we do, right? Move forward. It’s the only choice we have.

So, with every step I took toward what is now my home, I exhaled. The tiny droplets of water and ice I breathed out into the cold night hung under the arc of my umbrella until I stepped forward, leaving even my last breath behind.