Yesterday I was working in the little greenhouse, preparing it for winter. I’d thought I might overwinter peppers and eggplants but it won’t be warm enough in there so I brought out the tubs, picked the remaining vegetables, and swept the floor. I was surprised to find a cricket on the low bench.
Years ago, when John taught at Capilano College in Sechelt, I remember how when I’d drop in over his lunch break in autumn, there were always crickets in the washrooms, dark ones, chirping on the cool tiles. It was as reliable an indicator of fall as the geese in their untidy scribbles, calling against the mountain, or the scent of smoke in the morning as the fire in our woodstove caught and snapped. Sometimes a cricket would come in with the firewood, a portent of prosperity and health for the household.
I rearranged the pots of things that will stay in the greenhouse—the 3 olive plants, one with 4 little green fruits on it; the bougainvillea; the scented geraniums; the long tubs of greens I planted a month ago and which gave us a salad to share with friends for our Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday. And when I looked for the cricket, I couldn’t see it. But I heard it, heard it as I pruned and sorted, as I gathered the fallen bracts of the magenta bougainvillea.
I love the autumn, though it’s not without its melancholy. How did it get to be this late? That’s a question I ask myself frequently. Late in the year, late in my life. The other day a young man from Greenpeace called, following up on a petition I’d signed against the use of glyphosate. I knew a request for a donation was coming but in the meantime we had a nice chat. He wondered if I was familiar with Greenpeace’s work and I told him I am 66, that I remember the Phyllis Cormack (a repurposed halibut boat) heading to Alaska in the year I was in grade 11, hoping to head off the underground nuclear test planned by the US on the Aleutian island of Amchitka. I remember (I think) a demonstration on the lawn of the Legislature in Victoria. So yes, I was familiar with the long arc of Greenpeace’s activism. And now it’s microplastics, glyphosate, and what have we done to our planet? Moving plants in the greenhouse reminded me of the heat dome this past summer when it was so hot in the little structure that I had to sluice the cement block floor with cool water every few hours.
On a Thanksgiving Monday I am making soup with the remainder of the turkey, the first I’ve cooked in two years because we were away over Christmas in 2019, leading up to the pandemic, enjoying a holiday meal with Forrest, Manon, the boys, and Manon’s family. That Thanksgiving I think I roasted a chicken for John and me. Soup is the great solace of autumn, pots of turkey noodle, roasted squash, comforting borscht, potato and kale, Greek lentil. When it warms up a little outside, I’ll finish the greenhouse work, taking more geraniums in, emptying the rest of the soil from the peppers and eggplants. And I’ll keep an eye out for the cricket. They are symbols of good luck and vitality and I will make sure it knows it’s welcome.
The song of ourselves may move us, restless,
Through long nights. The cricket’s song of Autumn
Holds us still.
–Du Fu
...Theresa Kishkan 
It’s good to see awareness increasing about glyphosate. Although I remember gathering signatures about it in the very early aughts, and here we are. “Do you remember” indeed!
A group on the Sechelt Peninsula where I live received a grant to treat knotweed with glyphosate. Many of them are “environmentalists” and when I challenged some of them, they insisted there was no alternative. (A culture that has put people on the moon, photographed Mars, etc….) When I asked if they didn’t mind about the songbirds, amphibians in the ditches feeding into salmon streams, etc., they told me they’d never seen songbirds in knotweed. (Not looking enough, was my response.) Department of Highways treated the roadside below my house with glyphosate for that “noxious” hawkweed. Which doesn’t spread because of the terrain and which is mowed several times a year by a highways mower. And which butterflies love. I keep writing, calling, etc. but it’s like talking to wood.
This was as comforting to read as one of the bowls of soup you describe!
Are you familiar with Greenpeace’s work?” What a question.
I know, what a question. In 2021! But he was quite sweet and sort of gasped when I said, Now, I guess you’re going to ask for a donation…