Despite years of pleading from her children, my mother never gave in to buying “fun snacks.” Forget Cheetos and Chips Ahoy — her kitchen shelf houses walnuts, quinoa, flaxseeds and bran flakes. Only one item, though, is literally inedible. Tucked between the nuts and the cereal is a Bonne Maman jam jar crammed with molted cicada skins, three quarters of an inch long — tawny, translucent and curled like little old men. Though each exoskeleton boasts six legs, a ribbed abdomen and freaky little mouthparts, none has held an actual animal in nearly two decades.

The nymphal cases are impressively well-preserved for their age (“A testament to the durability of chitin!” Mom announced when she checked on them recently). They were collected in May 2004, when I was 7. That spring, millions of cicadas tunneled up from the soil around our home in Washington, D.C. Brood X was a regional menace, a plague of bird bait, out-screeching neighborly conversations and crunching under everyone’s feet. Our household, however, regarded them with reverence. This particular group had been underground for 17 years, my mom explained. Now they were ready to molt, and I was going to be allowed to stay up — till midnight! — to watch.

The first wave of cicadas arrived under cover of darkness, and Mom picked the earliest available nonschool night for our observational mission. My little sister and I stationed ourselves near the front door what felt like hours in advance. At 12 a.m., Mom handed each of us a flashlight. Then she led us across the street. On our neighbors’ fence, moon-white cicadas were emerging from little amber-colored exoskeletons, arching their backs in a show of impressive abdominal strength. Mom reached out and gently pulled each one off the fence. The skeletons went into the jar as souvenirs, and the still-damp insects went into our freezer, where they died what Isabel and I were assured were quick and painless deaths. The next morning, Mom blanched the bugs in a pot of boiling water, then dry-roasted them to turn their bodies crisp. Using chopsticks, she dipped each one in a vat of melted bittersweet chocolate. We helped her place them carefully on wax paper, where they dried.

Arranged on a plate, the cicadas looked like a set of slightly dumpy truffles. Remembering their ruby-red eyes and wet-looking bodies, I refused to taste-test the delicacy. More manageable was the task of carrying it the five blocks to school — where the candies were a huge hit. Listening to the rest of Ms. Miller’s second-grade class shriek in delight, I hastily changed my tune: The dish was my invention, actually, and anyone who thought bugs were gross was a big, fat baby.

Though to this day I have never managed to actually swallow a cicada, I was no stranger to creepy-crawlies. My mother is an entomologist, a biology professor at Georgetown who has spent the past 30 years studying how insects learn. In our house, bugs have always been invited guests. When Mom brought silver-spotted skipper caterpillars home from the lab in my elementary school years, Isabel and I would lie on our stomachs to watch them shoot frass pellets — mini-globs of dry feces — across the room. Dad didn’t complain: He’s an ecologist, too, and our family is enthusiastic, intensely informal, difficult to scandalize. Few things are off the table for us, conversationally or culinarily. More than once, we ate beets for dinner just to compare notes on how long it took them to redden our poop, and Mom frequently housed silkworms in a cardboard box in the dining room. (They were such noisy eaters that sometimes, we’d stop talking during meals just to listen.)

During the height of the 2004 Brood X emergence, a newly 8-year-old classmate invited me to her Harry Potter-themed birthday party. Before dropping me off, Mom brought me into our backyard for a photo shoot. She plucked several whining cicadas from the grass and planted them on my white Hermione Granger button-up. They clambered over to my necktie and hung on for dear life. In the pictures, I look smug: a true Gryffindor, bug-festooned and fearless.

I feel less that way today, having shed my student identity last spring during Zoom graduation and spent much of my first year of adulthood at home, doing my best to keep my sexagenarian parents insulated from the coronavirus. We’re all lucky to be able to work remotely, and many mornings, Mom’s and my primary expedition into the outside world has been a walk around the neighborhood with our dog, Okra. As weeks in quarantine became months, Mom catalogued the passing seasons for her Facebook friends — collecting strangely shaped leaves in need of identification, or acorns to leach and grind into flour, and painfully ripe persimmons, fresh from the sidewalk a block away. Her favorite specimens are what she calls “vagina sticks” — the twigs from whose yonic pockmarks the cicada hatchlings emerged before they burrowed underground all those years ago. (At home, she pairs the sticks with frothy-looking tangles of pale lichen and rosettes of turkey-tail fungus, hot-gluing the whole shebang onto barrettes to adorn our hair.)

Recently, though, there’ve been two extra causes for excitement on these foraging outings. One is epidemiological: Now vaccinated, Mom can stop to greet a neighbor without stress. The other is entomological: Last week, outside a friend’s house, she shrieked, bending over to point out a nickel-sized hole in the dirt. Finally, after a long, dark era of isolation, soon we — and the cicadas — will once again emerge.

For years, Mom’s formal research centered around metamorphosis: What carries over from adolescent to adult? In tobacco hornworms, she found, the answer is more than you might expect. The moths retain memories from their larval days, even as their physical features have been completely rearranged, their bodies temporarily dissolved into bug soup.

I’ve been thinking about that this spring as I watch my mother enter full cicada-prep mode. I abandoned any formal interest in biology long ago, opting for a career in journalism, and I’d be lying if I said I even clicked on the most recent YouTube video she sent about a fungus that destroys male cicada butts. Still, sitting on the couch together as I outline an article and she prepares to give yet another Zoom lecture on cooking with “tree shrimp,” it’s hard not to notice similarities. I’ve inherited Mom’s convivial cackle, her tendency toward procrastination and perfectionism, and her curiosity about the strange and surprising. Last week, helping her put the finishing touches on her illustrated guide to all things Brood X (“What to Expect When You’re Expecting … Cicadas!”), I was reminded that it was Mom who showed me how to tell a story, and her ecological obsession that taught me: Pay attention and pay respect. In all my work, I think, I’m trying to emulate her devotional concentration, her receptiveness to delight. And this year, reminded daily that life is fragile, I’m feeling lucky to get to bear witness to two stunning natural phenomena: the cicadas, and the lady who loves them.

My senior year of college, searching for a science credit, I signed up for Terrestrial Arthropods, the biological equivalent of Rocks for Jocks. The night before our first midterm, as the rest of my study group pestered me with vocab questions, I felt like the 7-year-old holding a tray of chocolate insects again: keeper of an exotic and valuable cargo. But now, as then, I was a bit of a faker, still secretly reliant on the true mastermind. As midnight approached, I frantically texted my mom, “What’s an example of hemimetabolous metamorphosis?!” She responded within minutes: Cicada molting! A second later, an explanation arrived: “No pupal stage, and the nymphs more or less resemble the adult.”