crickets – …Theresa Kishkan

soup

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

I’ve always loved the sound of crickets. In fall, or approaching it, we sometimes hear them in the house. And it’s the time of year when field crickets are drawn indoors, drawn by the warmth of the hearth.

A few weeks ago, John painted the back bedroom so it can be used as a nursery when babies visit. There was a cricket keeping him company as he painted, a premonition of grandson Arthur’s arrival the other day. I’ve read that it was common in ancient China to keep crickets in special cages and they could be counted on to act as family watch-dogs. Errr, watch-crickets. They sing almost constantly, only becoming silent if strangers approached in the darkness of night. Quiet = danger? Something like that.

We have a cricket cage, as it happens — part of a wind-chime arrangement. I can’t imagine keeping a little creature inside it, to sing or otherwise. And soon enough other crickets will find their way into the house, even into the kitchen where I’ve often found them hiding in firewood on the hearth or else on windowsills in warm reflected light.

And Arthur is happily occupying the newly-painted room — and his grandad’s lap.

It’s lovely to have him here (and his parents of course). I’m reluctant to hold him too much as a night drive down the Coast to Emergency the other night because I was having trouble breathing resulted in a diagnosis of double pneumonia. But that’s being treated with a powerful antibiotic and in a day or two I should be recovered enough to at least be a more active grandmum.

Let the crickets sing and the babies laugh and cry. I’m grateful to be able to hear all of it.

On a branch

floating downriver

a cricket, singing.

–Kobayashi Issa, trans. Jane Hirshfield

Tag: crickets

“The cricket’s song of Autumn/holds us still.” (Du Fu)

crickets, hearth and elsewhere