The
summer of 2001 I visited my mother at her home by Lake Texoma and she
suggested that I stay there and use her home as a place to come to
between my travels. Little did either of us know that I would stay
for nine years! I did travel but not as much as I had planned.
Sometime
in September of that year we heard a cricket chirping inside the
house and although we looked everywhere, including in the basement
and upstairs, we could never find it. And little by little, the
chirps came less frequently.
One
day after we heard one sad little chirp, I said, “I wonder what the
life span of a cricket is. This one seems to be hanging on quite a
long time for such a small insect.”
It
didn’t occur to either of us to look it up in one of Mother’s
reference books. The days went by and once in a while we would hear a
chirp and wonder where it was.
Gradually
we began to forget the cricket and life went on for us. One afternoon
I went upstairs and as I started to enter my bedroom, I heard the
cricket chirp loud and clear from the ceiling. I looked up and burst
out laughing.
Mother
yelled from downstairs and wanted to know what was so funny.
“I
found the cricket,” I said.
“Where
is it?” she asked.
“It’s
on the ceiling but it’s not a cricket. However it is dying.”
“So,
what is it?”
“The
battery in the smoke alarm.”
(Just
for reference, eventually I did google crickets and the life span of
an adult cricket is three months.)
