A Fortuitous Visit

A couple of weeks has gone by, or maybe it's been a month...time seems to be playing tricks on me lately. The only way I can truly keep track of time is to write it down; and though I've been jotting small scraps down here and there, I have not been as diligent as I should. 

**

I had come into work, a Monday, I believe. My boss was rather chipper that morning and after he greeted me, he came back out of his office and said, "Let me know if anything interesting happens up here." I looked at him with a curious look on my face, and asked him, "Is something going to happen that you know about?" He knows how easy it is to get my mind working and to wonder at every mysterious comment that comes my way; and he has been known to purposely make me worry. I suppose he gets a kick out of me turning from a calm being to a chaotic worry bug. "Just let me know if you notice anything unusual." 

"Did the lights get changed?" I ask. I come back from around my desk to inspect the office. "Did the window people come." He wouldn't budge. He knew something, and I would find out in good time. He went back to his office, and I to my desk.

Later on in the morning as I walked out of the office to go down the hall, there on the wall a couple feet above where Shorty the plant sits, I saw a good sized insect. "Ah ha!" I said aloud. My office mate heard me, and I heard him say loud enough for me to hear, "She must have found it!"

"It's a grasshopper!" I say, quite excited about our new visitor.

The boss comes out of his office. "Well, actually, it's a cricket."

"Oh, that's right."

"I wonder how he got in."

"Maybe when the cleaning people came, he hopped on one of their trash bins." Noticing that Shorty, who I had forgotten is actually a Peace Lily, had flowered (and it's been a long time), I said, "Or maybe he was inside the flower, and when it opened, out came the cricket." 

We decided to leave the cricket alone. Throughout the day, I went over and looked closer at him. I saw his long front feelers move around when I came near. The next day he had moved to one of Shorty's leaves. I wondered what would happen when I watered Shorty. Would the cricket jump out at me?

I saw this as a fortuitous event in the week: a cricket showed up and the Peace Lily bloomed. I haven't seen the cricket since, but I'm sure he's moved on to another home. As for the flower, it is still in bloom.

The Sound of Wings

A weary beginning to the day. Not a too sound night. Asleep with a low lamp on. Woken by the sound of a clickity-buzz and then a soft landing right next to my ear. I quickly sit up, look to find a cricket that managed to miss my head by millimeters. He flew into the pillow beside me and was nestled inside, right at the edge. In swift fashion, I get up to grab my glass and small book. Scoot—in he goes. I set the glass covered with the book on top on the kitchen counter until morning to release him.

I’ve grown accustomed to the sound the spider makes when he sometimes jumps down upon the chest of drawers or some other hard surface. And I’ve grown accustomed to look for him in the crevices he likes to wedge himself into and sometimes when I wake in the night, I look to make sure he’s not above me. I prefer when he’s not above me, prefer when he’s in his corner. This one in particular, is too hard to capture because he stays up high, and when he comes down the wall, he’s quick. Always, if I can, I take spiders outside. One day recently though, he or she was much too large for me to handle and I had to do what I didn’t want to do. I wrote about the experience in my notebook. I still feel traumatized by the whole thing and I suppose it is still filtering out of my system.

I much prefer the sound of a million wings flying through the sky…