Crickets

There I was. Sitting on the porch, staring at the sky. The sun had gone down about five minutes before, and the stars were just beginning to twinkle. The moon was shining bright and silvery. With a warm breeze kissing my skin, I suddenly realized how much I missed the moments like these. A cricket began to chirp near by. He was singing his night song with all his might. When I was a little girl, I never would have guessed that I would one day miss the sound of that little black bug's song.

I remember lying in bed at night and wishing the cricket that had made his home in the corner of my room would disappear. I cursed that bug many a night when he kept me awake. I also remember the day I finally found his hiding place. After the briefest moment of exultation, I felt the deepest urge to to destroy that chirping demon who prevented me form sleeping well. But...for some odd reason, I couldn't do it. I couldn't pick up my foot, make it come down, and put me and the cricket out of our collective misery. After a while, I scooped him up on a piece of paper and banished him to the great outdoors.

That was more than ten years ago. My parents split up a few months after the night with the cricket. I left for college in a city much larger than the sleepy little suburb where I grew up. One of the hardest adjustments that I made after I arrived was accepting I couldn't see the stars five minutes after the sun went down. I had also lived so close to the interstate that I couldn't hear anything but cars and big rigs speeding along all through the night.

Now, back on the front porch that was the setting for so many wonderful childhood memories, I realized that I could never go back to the noise and chaos that was my life in the city. I couldn't go back to a place where a person can't just look up and see stars peeping out and making their first appearance or lightning bugs drifting by lazily in the night sky. I wanted, no, needed to be able to sit outside on muggy summer nights and listen to the wind in the trees and feel the buzz of bees in the air. I needed to see Orion begin his nightly trek across the sky. Most of all, I miss the crickets.