Mulberry Jam

I consider myself a fairly brave person. I’m not afraid of heights, spiders, snakes, or the number 13. I like the outdoors and I love to tackle new handstands and forearm balances in my yoga practice. Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m not afraid to speak up in public. But I do have one phobia: crickets.

They have the reputation as cute little things. “Cricket” is a cute-sounding word. The Chinese consider crickets good luck. I liked Jiminy Cricket in Disney’s Pinocchio just fine, and I even liked the cricket that sang in Times Square in that old animated Christmas special you may remember. But somehow when I’m face to face with one of the jumpy little buggers, I start to think in clichés not normally heard outside of old Westerns, like, “the only good cricket is a dead one.”

This is the time of year when the crickets in the garden are multiplying like crazy, and now one of them has found his way into my kitchen. For the past three nights he’s been chirping away like crazy from a secret location hidden somewhere behind the radiator.

When crickets sing outside, I can kind of enjoy the sound as a contribution to the late-summer evening atmosphere, despite my dislike of the insects. But inside? This guy is so loud and so shrill he sounds like a police whistle. Not so much a nice "chirp, chirp" but more of a squealing "EEEEEEEEE." Last night he kept trying to start up during dinner, and my husband and I took it in turns to go over and bang on the wall to shut him up. But the crafty little devil just waited until we went to bed to start up in earnest.

Despite the fact that our bedroom is very near the kitchen, I wasn’t too troubled by the sound. I inherited my mother’s ability to sleep soundly and I can snooze through almost anything. My husband, sadly, is a light sleeper who is easily disturbed, and that cricket really got to him after a few hours. I woke up at 3 last night to realize he was out of bed and that I could hear some pretty strange noises coming from the kitchen. I tiptoed out of our room and peeked around the corner to the kitchen.

“Don’t come in here!” he warned me.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m hunting down that cricket,” he said with a crazed look in his eye. As I walked further into the room I could see that everything had been moved from one end of the kitchen to the other: chairs, cookie sheets, countertop appliances, even our stove. There stood my husband in the midst of the chaos, poised with a can of bug killer in his hand and a listening expression. “He’s somewhere behind this wall," he continued, "and I’m just waiting for him to make a move so I can get him.” So we stood there in silence for a few moments. Nothing. Not a chirp. That cricket just hunkered down to wait us out.

I was able to get my poor man calmed down enough to come back to bed, but we just left the kitchen torn up rather than try to put it back together at 3 AM. The next morning as we ate breakfast amid the ruin with occasional smart-aleck chirps from the defiant cricket, I tried to encourage him to cultivate a different attitude. I’ve been reading a lot of Buddhist and Yogic texts recently, so I suggested he try to strive for acceptance and non-attachment.

“Oh, I’m not attached to that cricket at all,” he shot back.

So I leave you with a philosopical question: Should the principle of non-violence apply to crickets?