Buying Crickets For My Garden

Gryllus bimaculatus sound recording: (This recording runs for three hours. If you click it, or copy paste it, you can open and play it in another open browser window while you read on and take in the pictures of this story. I find it most soothing. You may too.)

There’s crazy and then there’s crazy like a fox.

When I was a kid in Tennessee and Mississippi I sometimes bought crickets for fish bait. They were reasonably cheap and sold in pretty much every bait shop and backwoods grocery a kid with a little extra change in his pocket might come upon. Worms were better bait and free if you were willing to dig them (they stayed on the hook longer), and grasshoppers were free if you could catch them, but bait shop crickets were easy and kicked up just enough attention in the murky water to attract hungry Bluegills and Crappie (sometimes even a Largemouth Bass), to the barbed and baited fishhook hanging beneath my cane-pole’s tethered bobber on muggy, summer afternoons.

That was then.

Now I live way out in the northwestern corner of the country in a big ol’ city called Seattle, and the only local places I know of that you can get yourself some crickets are pet stores. Feeder crickets, they call them. Generally these pet store, feeders are Banded Crickets (Gryllodes sigillatus), which are reputedly longer lived, quieter songed, and softer bodied than wild, Field Crickets (Gryllus bimaculatus).

For pet lizards and frogs, and the like, these Banded Crickets are an excellent, living, moving, disease resistant food source. For a former kid in an increasingly geezer body, who sometimes harkens back to the sweet, noisesome, nighttime memories of his youth, they are a miraculous, even poetic time machine.

I buy crickets now, not as bait for scrappy panfish or to feed some favorite gekko, toad, or tarantula …but instead, to feed my ears, to soothe my heart, to stir up memories and fall asleep to. I buy them to keep in a small cage beside my bed, and to release into my garden. The ‘singing’ males make me smile. They make Mary smile too.

Some friends might think me strange, and some quite surely do. They have their reasons, I suppose. But my fear of their or anyone else’s cricketless judgements of me in this matter is smaller and much fainter-voiced than even the tiniest of these singing insects.

For the price of a single glass of a perfect, summery rosé or even a pint of some over-hopped micro-brew, I may grant myself the drone of crickets in the tall grasses and shaded crannies of my garden a hundred times, over several weeks while walking to the alley or watering the pots, or merely sitting in the shade watching the hummingbirds nectaring in the Bee Balm and Fuchsias.

And that continually tangled web within my head, and all those concerned and fearful voices that impose themselves into my awareness and not-so-awareness, all day long can somehow take a deep breath and relax into the sonorous darkness of night; cricket song and a loosening of countless, rest-robbing frets and worries.

Crickets.

Old school,

affordable,

analog,

magic.

A living sleep aid without all the side effects.

Gryllus bimaculatus sound recording:

“…Insects were inescapable on the Delta, primal elements within the very texture of the land. Some were cruel, painful stilletto stings, puffy welts. Others friendly, grassy whispers and poetry, gentle impressions on heart and mind. Together they are background: a deep ochre wash, a quiet sigh, fading boyhood memory.”

Raisin' Up Catfish

Prologue is where you ask...

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August 16, 2023

For my dear paid subscriber friends who, like me, may sometimes ache for the small kindness of a story read aloud ...a short meditation, the insect sounds and Delta smells that captivated my fifteen-year-old imagination during the summer I worked on a catfish farm, deep in the Delta country of Mississippi.