Palmetto Bug: 1, Cats: 0

This:



found scuttling menacingly around our kitchen last night. One of our cats, the fearless Brian Boru, sits watching it with an intensity that can only be seen when a cat stalks a bug. I, en route to making us a snack, drop everything and shriek. Ed comes running. Approximately half an hour ensues of Beth and Ed chasing the bug from one side of the room to the other, both cats (Moon has since entered the kitchen to see what all the fuss is about) batting at it, then backing away in fright when it comes near them, Ed kicking it back toward them in the hope that their hunting instincts will take over and they will rid us of the beast. No such luck. Finally, Ed, in one of his most impressive Deep South moments yet (second only to his making the untamed mess outside our door passable as a lawn), scoops up the bug with a large spoon and tosses it outside. We slam the door and return to our evening, but not without first admonishing the cats for their pathetic yellow-bellied cowardice. Here's hoping we never have rats...

Among the Pines

They drone steadily from the tall trees and possess the ventriloquist's gift of projecting their voices, so that predators have a difficult time locating them. Every seventeen years, one species of them makes an invasion of sorts, blanketing trees, buildings, and telephone poles from the eastern seaboard to Indiana and south through Tennessee. They are cicadas.

Every so often, you will find a cicada shell lying on the ground in parts of the southern half of the United States. This is because cicadas, not atypically, go through a development stage that requires the shedding of an exoskeleton.

What Beth found on the campus of Southern Mississippi last week was something slightly more unusual. A cicada corpse, if you will, lying on the ground and perfectly preserved. She naturally picked it up and took it home, but the question was what to do with it...Frame it and hang it on the wall? Paste it to a trivet and feature as a dining table centerpiece? She decided, instead, to box it and send it in the mail to an artist/filmmaker friend with an interest in insects.

And so, it is currently on a mail truck somewhere, or in the reliable hands of some anonymous postal worker who will let neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stay him from the swift completion of delivering a dead cicada to its appointed destination.

What we've seen

Outside our side door that leads from the kitchen to the carport, this little creature can be seen at night, scurrying across the wall. It is a gecko.