Kind soul

 

     A cicada got in the house. Not sure how. Some sneak in as stowaways on my shoulder, hopping on after I'd inspected the yard. This one was seen in shadow on the back of the roller blind in our bedroom. My wife pointed it out.
     The roller blind was new, pure white and quite expensive. The last thing I wanted to do is smear a tablespoon of cicada gore across it. The stain would never come out. That streak would mock me for the next decade. I paused, contemplated, did that spatial cognition thing that men are so good at, and determined I could pull the shade without crushing the cicada.
     "Get me a Dixie cup," I asked my wife, not wanting to take my eyes on the cicada, lest it make its getaway and secrete itself in a hidden nook in our bedroom, from where it would torture us with its shrieks for weeks to come. My wife brought the cup. I nudged red-eyed bug deftly into it, without blotching the shade. I strode into the bathroom, shook the cicada into the toilet, and flushed.
     Then I returned to the bedroom, and saw my wife's face. She was ... not crestfallen. Not shocked. A slight shade of a something that, after 40 years together, I immediately understood.
     "You thought I would take it outside?" I said.
     "Yes," she replied.   
     "To join the trillion other cicadas nibbling on our sapling branches?"
     "Yes."
     And that, dear reader, is why we've been married for 34 years come September. "A woman of valor, who can find?" Proverbs 31:10 asks. "For her price is far above rubies." Maybe so. But a woman of kindness? A truly sympathetic person? Someone who can relate to the inherent value of the primitive flying insect that finds its way to her bedroom? That is rarer still.
     Friday I walked over and picked up lunch from Little Louie's — a Northbrook icon, and if you haven't patronized the place lately, you should. We ate on our back porch, while the cicadas filled the air over our heads, leaping off and on the spreading branches of the two sugar maples that form a partial canopy above our heads. She marveled at them in a way that, for all the media coverage, I'd never heard before. The cicadas were beautiful. She was so happy we live here, and not some other place, where the unfortunate residents miss this spectacle. What a special time!
     That evening, in our bedroom, I reclined onto the pillow and realized something light was moving on my neck. A cicada, I hoped. Sitting up, I requested her immediate attention. She grabbed a Kleenex and, after some Marx Bros. fumbling, plucked it away. Then she exited the room and hurried down the stairs. I did not have to ask where she was going.