Crickets and Cicadas

I made 15 teenager’s mouths drop open last week. It seems a cricket had made it’s way into my classroom somewhere, and decided to wait for a break in my lecture to begin singing… or chirping… or cricket-ting. Frankly I have no idea what it’s called when a cricket makes noise but it was definitely doing just that. I know my eyes must have been as big as saucers as I managed to stutter out, “What is THAT?”

When informed that is was a cricket, it was all I could do not to drop everything and start looking for it, in order to get a concert of the sound up close and personal! As a matter of fact, I came awfully close to enlisting the help of my class to do just that. Why?

Well, perhaps it’s because I’ve only been hearing things like this for a very short amount of time. I heard the chorus of cicadas this September, which is the best I have heard them since my initial cochlear implant activation in 2005. The nice thing about cicadas, however, is they leave behind a memento… a shell… something I can count as an “ebenezer” of sorts. Crickets don’t leave that type of keepsake behind. I think they simply die – grin! In the Old Testament, Samuel set up an “ebenezer” as a memorial stone, in order that the Israelites would remember how God routed the Philistines from the area.

It’s October, and I cannot hardly believe it. Where did the summer go? It’s autumn already and the leaves are beginning to turn colors and fall to the ground. Crickets and Cicadas seem to be everywhere. They are both seem eager to “wax melodious”, and yet are so different, aren’t they?

Are you a cricket or cicada? Tricky question really. All of us would like to be the kind of person that we “leave behind a lasting impression”… an ebenezer… a memorial. Have you ever thought about how you would be remembered? When your “song” is finished and winter’s snow covers the frozen ground, will you find that you are a cricket or a cicada?