Friday, September 5, 2008

Survival of the cricketest

There is a cricket in my bathroom. I do not know how it got in, but we live on a farm; bugs get in. He sang on& off most of the night. When I go in & turn on the light, he gets quiet. I say he because he is; so far as I know female crickets keep quiet.

In Waiting for Aphrodite, Sue Hubell writes about a species of cricket that got cut off from their fellows . By a glacier, if I recall. It has been a while since I read the book or since a glacier came through the Ozarks. I do not think there will be a my-bathroom version of the camel cricket. Not just because the bathroom is not a hospitable environment for cricket evolution, but mostly because there is almost certainly no lady cricket or he would not still be making such a racket. As I told A this morning "that cricket really needs to get laid".

Ordinarily, I find the sound of crickets soothing. I do not mind the cicadas, the tree frogs or even the sounds the gators make (actual alligators, I mean; football fans I could live without). But this cricket is a bit loud, although that might be because he is lost. One of the calls crickets make is to establish territories & define them for other male crickets. It seems in the absence of any other cricket territories, the lone cricket has no territory either.

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