The frequency was very high as we walked out onto the street one sultry night recently with O’en, owing to the tree crickets, whose numbers in our otherwise comatose neighborhood seemed to be legion.
“It’s [by this I think she was referring to life] all about sex,” said Mary as I began to do my best impersonation of the males’ castanet-like din: “Chich-chich-chich, chich-chich-chich, chich-chich-chich,” rubbing my hands back and forth behind me as best, and in as deep a timbre as I could, for they say this is what the male tree crickets do with their long pair (they have a short pair too) of wings.
So, anyway, it was a real racket, so much so that I thought, briefly — for I think they’re beginning to think of me as a crank — of calling the town police. I can imagine what the desk officer would say: “It’s Graves again — he says they’re partying again up his way and he wants something done about the noise that’s crossing property lines.”
First it was the peepers, now the tree crickets, and then soon, perhaps, there’ll be the slugs. Yes, yes, it’s as Mary, more akin to nature than I, says — all about sex.
And speaking of slugs, we tip our hats to them, for it was four years ago at just about this time when Mary, who was reading one late August evening out on our little front porch, called out, “Jack, you’ve got to see this.”
And indeed it was a wonder.
Reverently, we looked on as the slugs — which, as I was to learn later from David Attenborough, are hermaphroditic, each possessing male and female organs — wreathed together in a slow, transfixing dance, probing and encircling each other’s bodies with their male organs, which had sprouted from behind their heads (if I understood him correctly), creating in the languorous, balletic process a flowering blue sphere in which sperm was exchanged.
“Now that’s love making,” I said, enrapt, and rendered wiser by what I’d seen, and — as Mary would say — more connected with the natural world of which we all are a part.
So rub on tree crickets, rub on. “Chich-chich-chich, chich-chich-chich!”