All the Hopping Things

September Writing Challenge - Prompt #32:

Animal

The other night I was in my living room after dark, and I could hear a cricket. It was really loud, so I opened the front door to see if I could find it. When I stepped out on the porch, I couldn’t hear it as well. I went back inside and closed the door, and the cricket became loud and rhythmic again. It almost sounded as if it were in the house. So, once again, I went outside and could barely hear it from the porch. I went back inside, and sure enough, I could hear the cricket as if it were right there in the room with me. I walked around the living room trying to figure out where the cricket might be. My best guess is that it was hidden somewhere in our jackets and backpacks that hang on a hook behind our front door. I shook all the bags and backpacks but never figured it out. 

I went upstairs and found Scotty (who was pretending to watch The Hobbit but was actually asleep in our bed) and told him that I thought there was a cricket in the house. 

Several years ago, we had a cricket in our house in the middle of the night. It traveled into our home via some basil my mother-in-law gave us. I remember it being such a long night trying to find that cricket to no avail. I was pregnant with Zoe and nearing my third trimester, and I was desperate for sleep! Our cat eventually got fed up with the cricket and took care of business, bless his soul. But now we have no cat, and therefore, no means to an end if a cricket gets in the house. 

Sleeping Scotty was mostly delusional and didn’t care about my news regarding the cricket. Eventually, the cricket wasn’t chirping anymore, and we kind of forgot about it and went to bed. Around 1 o’clock in the morning, I heard the cricket chirping again. Zoe came wandering in my room, saying, “Mom! There’s a cricket in my room. I think it’s in the stuffed animals.” I went into her room, and she was correct. The sound of the cricket was coming from the stuffed animal hammock hanging in the corner. There was a small wooden chair nearby, so I stood on the chair and tapped the stuffed animal hammock. The chirping stopped, and then after I waited for a minute, it started up again. One by one, I pulled every stuffed animal out of the hammock, and I couldn’t find the cricket. Even if I did, I don’t know what I would have been able to do about it. 

Scotty had gone down to the living room to sleep on the couch and wait for Nicky to get home from being out with friends. He eventually woke up and wandered upstairs. I told him that the cricket was now in the girls’ room. He went and got in bed and went to sleep. Clearly, he didn’t understand the seriousness of what was going on. There was no way my paranoid Zoe would ever go back to sleep until the cricket was formally removed. I hung out in her room a little longer,  and the cricket went silent. I hoped that Zoe had fallen back asleep, so I went back to bed, but then the cricket started chirping again, and Zoe immediately came into our room. Even though I had told him what was happening, Scotty hadn’t comprehended the situation. So when Zoe came in our room, he finally woke up all the way, and went to hunt down the cricket. 

By that time, the cricket had hopped out of the animal hammock and was hanging out on the wooden chair that I had been standing on while trying to find it. Scotty was able to find it and take care of it. When he came back to bed, he told me that it had been a very strange looking cricket, and that he had never seen one like that before. He then spent at least 30 minutes googling crickets until he found a picture of what had been in our house.

He believes it was a broad winged tree cricket.

And here I was thinking grasshoppers were our problem, but it seems to be a plethora of hopping creatures. 

What’s next? Kangaroos?