Jiminy Cricket!

Now that the semester has started Spencer spends Monday night at a friend's place in Madison so that we can save a bus ticket on Tuesday. Last Monday I drifted off to sleep listening to the sound of the crickets chirping outside. One little guy was particularly loud. The next day I got home from work and upon walking in the door was greeted with an enthusiastic CHIRP! It was then that I realized that the sound I'd heard last night had been coming from someplace inside the apartment. Feeling somewhat creeped out, I finally narrowed his location down to the bathroom, but search as I might I couldn't find the little guy. When Spencer came home he joined in the hunt, and discovered the intruder crouched behind the toilet. He snatched a piece of toilet paper and was poised to take action when I stopped him. I don't know what it was. Perhaps it was all those years listening to the "goodnight noises" when visiting my grandmother in rural Kansas, maybe it was that song about wishing on a star, or maybe the fact that the chirp had started to sound so plaintive and the little cricket looked so small, and helpless. But strangely (and I say 'strangely' because I detest any and all spiders 'Charlotte's Web' notwithstanding) I'd come to feel a sort of camaradarie with the little bug. So, I grabbed the strainer and a piece of card stock (I didn't feel enough camaraderie to actually touch him, mind you) and escorted our guest back out into his little world. Perhaps he promptly got gobbled up by someone a link or two up on the food chain. I'd like to think he made it safely home to Mrs. Cricket and all their little crickets, or at the very least rejoined his buddies in the football field behind our home and is singing blithely with them each evening.