We’ve got a cricket in the house. For the past two nights it’s started singing around 10 p.m. once the kitchen has been cleaned and the girls have been asleep for an hour or so and Mallory are making our way to bed after deciding which books we’ll be reading before turning out the lights.
Listen, I have no problem with crickets. I find their song full of charm and nostalgia. I love hearing them from the front porch or when I’m walking through a field at dusk. But when you have a cricket in your house you are forced to be made aware of how loud they are. This one is loud. And here’s the thing: we can’t find it. Is it somewhere in the living room? Perhaps hiding behind all the children’s books we keep stacked in the cold (old coal burning) fireplace? Is it in the laundry room, tucked in behind the stacked washer/dryer that fits inside the tiny room that is better described as a closet? Is it in my closet? Mallory’s? Is it under our bed?
I run a small fan-powered white noise machine each night, something I’ve done for years, even before meeting Mallory. She can’t stand it. She likes silence, which means she likes hearing all the bumps and bangs of the night: the girls calling out in their dreams down the hall, the pinecones hitting the roof from the 80-year-old trees that tower above our house, the mournful whistle of the train that passes around 10:30 p.m. and again around 3:00 a.m. I don’t want to hear that stuff, not when I’m sleeping at least. But bring a cricket into the house and Mallory suddenly loves a good sound machine. I have a travel version, and last night we plugged it in beside her bed and let it rip at full power.
We could still hear the cricket. I went to bed at 10:00 p.m. and listened to its intermittent call. I woke up and heard it when Mallory came to bed at 11:00 and feigned sleep while she got out a flashlight and looked around our bedroom for it. I woke in the middle of the night and heard it while taking a bathroom break. And this morning, when my eyes popped open at 6:00 a.m., I could still hear it.
I’ve been awake for an hour and a half, reading and listening for the cricket, trying to figure out where it is. (I think it’s in the fireplace behind those books.), and I’ve also been trying to come to terms with the fact that I’m a little stuck on my novel. Sure, I’ve been writing a lot over the past week when I haven’t been working on the novel (letters to students; putting syllabi together for the fall; notes for essays, etc.), and it’s all part of the same larger job of being a writer, but the novel-in-progress is the thing that needles me when I’m not working on it, just like that hidden cricket’s song. Whether I’m working on it or not, the novel is always there, sometimes out of sight. calling for me to come find it. It’s real and urgent, whether I can see it or not.