A word on crickets.

They're back. If any of you Austinites out there remember the great Cricket Invasion of aught seven, take heed. Those nasty, persistent, bold little buggers found a way into my office and made it their home, their play and breeding ground, for the whole of the summer last year. This situation forced me to come to terms with a number of things.

At first I had to learn to dispose of them myself, humanely scooping them into a cone made of paper and then gingerly walking them outside, to be set free into the concrete wilderness. Although I am a person who likes to harm no things, that kind of treatment got old real quick. Taking them outside was like depositing them directly into a bird's mouth anyway.

After I got over the novelty of my self-imposed ritutal of humane displacement, I had to learn the perfect helpless tone of voice that would ensure male assistance when I didn't feel like disposing of these critters myself, or when I was past the point of caring and ready for them all to hurry up and DIE DIE DIE.

I also took the opportunity to educate myself on crickets in culture. It turns out they're a big hit in China. People keep them as pets, domesticated loose or in cages, and are soothed by their chirping, or singing, as they deem it. They also breed them for strength and hold fighting matches. Crickets are a symbol of good luck all throughout Asia. In fact, at certain periods in history, a cricket was seen as a classy type of pet to own.

I'll wax sentimental for a moment – crickets are pretty amazing if you think about it. There's something to be said for a singing insect. It's a mystical and intriguing characteristic, and I can see why they have such a solid place in folklore. Only the males chirp, like some kind of ancient operatic mating ritual, and they do it in tune with the temperature. You can actually count their chirps to determine how many degrees it is outside, which sounds like an award-winning science fair project for someone's 5th grader.

That's enough of their virtues. Let's talk about the smell, shall we? Were you aware that dead crickets give off a revolting odor? By August of last year, I could not walk into a certain corner of my office without gagging. Literally gagging. There were people who actually worked in those corners and I do not understand how they got used to such a horrifying stink. Nothing helped. I kept a heavily scented candle at my desk, burning right under my nose, surely a fire hazard but it somehow dulled my olfactories just enough so that I didn't have to spend the entire day with my nose under my shirt. The aerosol fragrance we had on hand was "Clean Cotton," which has now been ruined forever. To this day it smells like crickets and it can never be reclaimed. I'm not sure if it's their waste or their decaying carcasses, but the stench was thick. Appalling, even. At first we tried vacuuming them up, but the main result of that was that the vacuum became infected with cricket stench and only exacerbated the problem. There were times when I thought about that scene in Silence of the Lambs where Jodi Foster goes to see a dead body and puts that white stuff under her nostrils, wondering where I could get some of that.

In addition to their olfactory offensiveness, crickets are bold. They have no problem being in plain sight. They will perch delicately on a wall right in front of your face. They will even arrange themselves decoratively on the wall so as to appear stylish. They will jump off the wall at you if they feel like it. They will certainly jump out from under a piece of paper. You better sit cross-legged in your chair because they will crawl across your feet. No one is safe. They will get right up in your purse, so you better put in in a drawer, and even there you can never be sure.

It was like something out of Little House on the Prairie. The sheer mass was so out of control that they actually turned off the lights in the UT tower as an attempt to curb the problem, a historical first. The invasion still haunts me. I have to be careful when going through drawers at work, or a random box that has been sitting idly on the floor, for fear of being surprised by yet another lost carcass.

We'll never get them all. We've actually sort of given up. Stray cricket pieces are just a part of the work culture now. Today I delivered three whole, live ones to outer safety, so I suppose I've done some healing over the past year. I've gotten to the point where I can enjoy their soft chirping on a summer's night in my backyard, but I may never be able to see crickets as a benign presence again.