Cave Crickets

October 15, 2020

Apparently, cave crickets come with the territory.

I didn't notice them when we first looked at the house in Charlottesville, but I saw them lurking the day after we moved in while arranging stuff in the garage. Cave crickets have various other names, like camel crickets and spider crickets; my neighbor Louise called them cave spiders. They congregate in cool, damp places. They're big, but are no threat to humans... unless you count the threat to our psyches, because they don't just hang there on the wall, they jump. I'll spare you a photo, because they are just too creepy for a column even during Halloween season, but you can read about them here.

There's nothing much you can do to get rid of cave crickets once they've decided that yours is a party house, except make it boring to them by caulking cracks and running dehumidifiers and eliminating cluttery hiding places. I used to announce out loud that Louise had a cave cricket beer keg hidden in her shed, but they knew I was lying. When I was in the garage, I was never sure what was a shadow and what was a cave cricket, so I didn't look closely. I had a choice: Give in to my squeamishness in front of the kids, or take deep breaths and shoo the demons away calmly when they got in my way (the critters, not the kids). The year we were living there, I did my best to focus on all that is lovely about Central Virginia, and that's (mostly) what I remember about that time.

Parenting territory, too, comes with lots of cave crickets—those less-than-gratifying aspects of helping kids grow up that you didn't appreciate before experiencing them directly. Contrary to their reputation, babies sometimes smell awful. Toddlers will be your rapt audience in the bathroom; preschoolers keep up running commentary about nothing; preteen squabbles mar many a quiet evening; teenagers have unending recommendations for how you can be a better parent. Managing it all successfully requires summoning lots of grace and suppressing snappy comebacks.

The cave crickets from COVID are countless, because we've never even been in this cave before. We're doing mental math about risks when we go out, we're sifting the facts from the fiction, we're clinging to jobs in a precarious economy, we're buying stuff to keep us protected. We're gradually seeing what our kids aren't learning in a radically-altered school environment, and planning how to slide into those gaps. We're doing our best to hang on with grace, even though we don't know for sure what's lurking in the shadows.

I'm hoping that someday the year of COVID will seem like my year in Charlottesville: The scary bits come with the territory, but they make the story a story. With some focus and hard work, we can shoo the demons away while we write a satisfying ending.