It all started when the grandchildren were visiting in August. “What’s that noise?” Alex asked. We were working in the garden. Ben was cutting down the shasta daisies, which had gone by. He was feeling smug because he had the grown-up, really sharp clippers and Alex had only scissors. Alex was dead-heading the dianthus. Livi was picking basil so I could make pesto. She was busily stripping a basil plant of every single leaf, not picking a leaf here, one there – as I would have. “I don’t like pesto,” she says. “I want butter on my pasta. I want to help make the pesto. My mother lets me help her.” Alex chimes in, “I want to help make pesto too.”
“What noise, Alex?” I say.
“That clicky noise,” he replies.
“Oh, that’s the grasshoppers. They make that noise when they start to fly.”
All work stops. We walk around the garden, watching grasshoppers hop, listening to their click, click clicking, watch them flying. Then, back to work.
There, on a big leaf of a rudbeckia are two grasshoppers, one on top of the other. “Oh, look at this,” I say. Can’t I keep my big mouth shut?
Alex runs over; Livi joins him. We all stare at the grasshoppers. “What are they doing?” asks Alex. “I think they’re mating,” I reply, waiting for the logical next question, which I don’t want to answer. Let their parents answer the sex questions.
“Ooooo, look.” Alex squeals. “Something is coming out of this one’s rear end. What is it?”
I wish to remain ignorant of the sex life of the grasshopper. “I don’t know,” I say. “We’ll have to go to the library and get a book on insects. Let’s get back to work.”
Later, Alex (this kid is a keen observer) spies two grasshoppers on the trumpet vine, one on top of the other. The next day I go out and look at the trumpet vine. The grasshoppers are still in exactly the same place, same position. Are they stuck together? I’ve heard of throwing cold water on dogs. What do you do for grasshoppers? I give a gentle poke, they move slightly. Not dead. Best to leave them alone. Next day, gone.
After the children leave at the end of August, I discover that the grasshoppers were only the beginning. Suddenly there are insects everywhere: small white moths flying all over the place and floating dead in the rain barrel (where a red squirrel had committed suicide earlier; I must find a lid for it); dragonflies landing on the deck, on plants; then the arrival of another insect, its name unknown to me. This one has gossamer double wings like a dragonfly but the body is black, almost as thin as a pencil lead, but it ends in a scorpion’s tail.
The dragonflies met each other with a respectful gentility. These last bugs were absolutely mad with lust, totally crazed. Flying with speed and purpose, they madly pursued each other. Couplings started on leaves, went airborne, still joined. Collisions occurred in mid-air and on the arm of my chair. I sat on the south deck, laughing to see that our lawn was the site of a vast orgy. How had I never noticed this before? What does it portend for next year? Will all this rampant sex produce a plague of bugs?
Autumn is officially here now. The insects know this. The summer madness has waned; only a few clicking grasshoppers are left. Woolly caterpillars are appearing on the colored leaves that will soon fall. Soon the flies will try to come inside.
It won’t be too long now before our island roads are busy with trucks loaded with traps; when will my neighbor, Leroy, pull his traps this year? When will it grow too cold to fish? When will come the time to hibernate, to gather around the wood stove?
– Gayle Ashburn Hadley, Stonington