100th Post, a New Library, and Mormon Crickets

Austin, Nevada last week.

Hello readers and writers! It’s a bright and shiny day here in Austin, Nevada. We’re experiencing our first really warm days and our summer activities have begun. I’m told that two high school seniors  graduated yesterday in our tiny school district in a lovely ceremony with all the pomp and circumstance of a much larger school. Congratulations to them and their families! In addition, our new library opens to the public Tuesday, and our summer friends are arriving—they of the full-time RV life—bringing their fresh faces and musical entertainment to our quiet town.

How are you? Is the season bringing you joy? What are you up to in your community and life? What changes does the summer season bring?

I opened the main page on my WordPress blog today and noticed I’d written 99 blogs so far. The number 99 is so close to 100 that I felt it best to get down to it and send out another. I don’t post regularly, so 100 posts isn’t really too impressive considering I started this blog in 2013. I spend much more time working on my manuscript and querying prospective agents than I spend blogging.

Still, it almost always feels good to write a blog post (once I’ve committed to sitting down and I’m at least a few paragraphs in-not so much at the beginning when I’m staring at the blank page, obviously) – it’s a way to reach out to family, and friends, old and new, and also is a sort of diary where I can record images and thoughts on times and places—and of course, there’s the curative element of a diary or journaling.

Recent and current books I’ve been reading: A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles; The Night Tiger, Yangsze Choo; A World of Curiosities, Louise Penny; and Hang the Moon, Jeanette Walls. They are all wonderful!

A lovely book, and a fun journal I bought in January while traveling.

I was excited to learn that A Gentleman in Moscow has been adapted to the screen in a series (thank you, Denice from Washington who stopped into the library last week!), so I will watch that as soon as I finish the novel.

The Night Tiger is enthralling- we’re listening to it when we travel to the grocery store (112 miles away), and any other time we’re in the car for more than 10 minutes (which is anytime we leave town since we are so remote…). Here’s an example of the wonderful writing just from memory. Choo describes a doctor’s writing as “a conga line of ants.” Brilliant!

As for Louise Penny… she got me with the first Chief Inspector Armand Gamache mystery years ago, and I am never disappointed as the series progresses. Wonderful characters, heart, and settings.

Books! Wonderful books!

I am a big fan of Jeanette Walls and have read and reread The Glass Castle several times. Hang the Moon is another big thumbs up!

Meanwhile, the crickets are back. Just last week I was remarking that there weren’t any in our yard this year and maybe the gigantic hordes that usually march through town would miss us this year. Uh, no. I’m sure that no matter where you live you have some kind of unusual local wildlife… There are other parts of this state, for example, that experience large migrations of tarantulas, and I know the cicadas are a huge presence in other parts of the country. I’ve heard that Miller moths are everywhere in parts of Nebraska… It’s all a bit eek, but I always think of the line from one of the Jurassic Park films, “Life finds a way.”

I am one of trillions… I just want to travel south (I don’t know why!), but your house in the way! Please move your house!

This, too, shall pass!

Have a wonderful weekend and please do  check in and share what’s going on in your little corner of the world!

Jiminy Crickets!

Austin is currently crawling with crickets. And they are not named Jiminy. They don’t quite have Jiminy’s charm, his staunch set of personal ethics, nor his spiffy wardrobe. Also, thank goodness, so far none of them have stood on top of my shoulder or given me a good lecture. No, these crickets are definitely not Disney material.

Jiminy Cricket created by Ward Kimball. Photograph from Walt Disney’s Pinocchio (1940)

The crickets I speak of swarm the West in various regions all the way from the Rocky Mountains to the High Sierras. They are called Mormon Crickets, though obviously, they are not Mormon. Just to be contrary, these little imposters aren’t even crickets! They are actually shield-backed katydids. And they aren’t little either…sometimes they’re 3 inches long.

I’m not purposely making this confusing. Really!

The story of their naming goes something like this: Way back when, swarms of these critters were eating crops planted by early Mormon settlers in what is now named Utah. It was a tragedy. What would the settlers eat when winter set in? Then, suddenly, like a miracle, a flock of seagulls descended from above. It must have been a very large flock, because the seagulls ate all the insects, thereby saving the crops.

Intermountain Forest Service, USDA Region 4 Photography / copied from goodfreephotos.com

Yay, seagulls!

Mormon crickets travel in large groups, marching along relentlessly, eating everything in their path (including their fallen comrades; this is why I question their ethics). When they cross a busy highway and get run over, their fellow insects stop to eat them. And then they get run over…

In some places the roads become dangerously slick… I know. Ugh. A local man, now retired from the road department, told me yesterday that some years ago his crew had to use a snowplow to clear away the detritus and then many, many gallons of detergent to wash Main Street.

This is our second summer here in Austin, and my husband and I are trying to take the current invasion in stride, but I admit it’s a bit of a challenge what with our yard and the outside walls of our house being covered in an ever-moving mass of large insects. Still, I can not blame the Mormon Crickets for being Mormon Crickets. Their life is no trip to Disneyland.

During moments of quiet contemplation, I fondly remember the seagulls of Kenosha gathered on the shores of Lake Michigan. Always so many. So lovely on the sand, on the waves, and in flight.

And like Elizabeth Warren, I persist.

Photograph: Kenosha, Lake Michigan, and Seagulls by Lori Pohlman