By Stephanie Abbajay

Enough already with the crickets. When will they be dead? I mean that in the nicest possible way, of course, and with all due respect to all of God’s creatures, even the ones who in their terrific abundance wake us up in the wee hours with their insistent chirping.

I don’t know about where you live, but out here in Dow, the number of crickets has reached epic, Biblical proportions. They are everywhere, and that includes inside our house, where they slip under doorways, cling to clothing, hide inside shoes and bags, (that’s a nice surprise, finding a live cricket inside your sneakers). They settle under dressers and beds, where they set up their mating call, or racket as we call it.
Is there anything less satisfying than the crunch of a dead cricket under one’s foot or, worse, the squish of a live one? They cannot be avoided. One dropped on me from a light bulb in my closet yesterday. They hop from step to step, from floor to floor and from room to room.

They are so prolific, and their life span so short, that every night, before bed, every member of my house goes room to room, dustpan in hand, sweeping up the dead ones. We each usually take in at least a dozen.

At first I couldn’t bring myself to kill them, so I engaged in a pathetic catch and release program. I went about the house with a subscription card from a magazine in one hand and a plastic cup in the other. When I found a cricket I slammed the cup down over him (her?) and then gently slid the card underneath (I could hear their little legs scrambling over the top of the card). I then carried the critter outside and released it. Oskar told me to give up, that I could never win against their superior numbers, but I persevered.

That is until my mother-in-law and husband shamed me into the kill zone. Being hardy farmer-types, they know a no-good critter when they see one. When my mother-in-law saw me releasing a cricket the other night, she gave me a hard look and promptly stomped on it. Take that.

My husband, too, aims to kill. Every night before bed he crawls around the bedroom on hands and knees, rolled up magazine in hand, muttering obscenities, searching and destroying. Without fail, several survive his onslaught and every night we are awakened by a chorus of piercing chirps (and at 2 a.m., they are piercing). Furious, he flips on the light and does the dance again, finding and killing the offenders. The next morning he will say, “Did you hear those crickets last night? Did they wake you up?” To which I invariably reply, ”No sweetheart, YOU woke me up.”

The hordes of crickets should come as no surprise, numerous and unstoppable as they are. After all, this seems to be the land of freakish animals: cats who leave mouse faces and entrails as signs of love, coyotes that run down the middle of the street in broad daylight, killer ladybugs, grasshoppers so thick you have to roll up your windows and turn on the windshield wipers and, perhaps worst of all, giant horseflies.

Last week, a horsefly buzzed my husband as he was walking into his wood shop. The thing dive bombed his head a few times then lit upon a post. Dave walked up to it and said it was about three inches long and thick as his thumb. So, like any good country boy, Dave got out his BB gun and shot it. He then stepped on it and said it was like stepping on a ripe plum.

I am grateful that the crickets aren’t so big that they could be shot, but in this land of abundant and strange critters, I won’t hold my breath at what may appear next year.