Trading Grasshoppers For Peace

Back in early August, we hosted three visitors for two weeks.

These were my sister’s grandkids, aged 7, 9, and 13.

The Missus and I did a good job preparing, or so we thought. We stocked up on eggs, cereal, peanut butter, hot dogs, toilet paper, and other material needs, but forgot to increase our personal stores of answers to questions about the future.

“Uncle Sigmadog, when will we get there?”

“Uncle Sigmadog, will it be sunny when we go to the baseball park?”

“Uncle Sigmadog, will we have fun at the Movie Night in the Park?”

“Uncle Sigmadog, will I survive four more years of communist rule?”

I may be incorrectly remembering that last one.

It didn’t take long for me to institute a ban on questions about the future. This was not a popular rule, but it did slow them down.

The older niece spent much of her time reading, drawing and doodling indoors.

The two littles, a girl and boy (7 and 9 respectively), spent most of their time outside digging holes, building forts, and searching for critters. As you may know, we live in the middle of the woods on ten acres with lots of adjacent forest. On the first day we walked them around the property, saying, “Do what you want, wherever you want, as long as you can still see the house.”

They enjoyed that freedom and seemed to have a great time.

Everyday we went on long morning hikes, working up to over two miles of steep hills and valleys in the forest. We told them about the animals that lived out here. I gave the two little ones small compasses and explained how to show North so they could find their way through the woods alone someday.

Over the course of their visit I learned a few things.

1. Kids get really dirty. I knew this fact intellectually, but had not come face to face with it for many years. We immediately instituted daily baths and were considering two-a-days, but realized once was enough as long as we kept our distance.
2. I discovered how cranky I can be at sixty-two. I quickly gave up calmly answering their inane rapid-fire non-future questions because nine times out of ten they were already in the middle of the next question when I got around to answering their previous. Instead of answering questions, I maintained a stoic silence unless I saw arterial bleeding.
3. I forgot how much energy, food (and milk!) it takes to keep youngsters alive. I instructed them that death is always a possibility out in the woods. That lesson was emphasized when on one of our daily hikes I took them to the moose boneyard. A moose died there several years ago and the only thing left were the bones. A few of the larger ones were immediately scavenged by the kids, but not the other, smaller, bones which I told them belonged to rude children of other relatives. I think they got the message.
4. The sandpile was a major attraction. It’s there for winter traction, but they had lots of fun climbing up and burying things in it. The fascination with the pile lasted until I warned them the cats liked to use it as a litter box. They told me they thought those little clumps were just dried sand clods. That was when I ruled in favor of mandatory hand-washing (with soap!) whenever they came inside.
5. There are a lot of snakes out here in the woods. Not the dangerous kind, just garter snakes and the occasional rubber boa (really, they exist). The kids occupied themselves capturing them and carrying them around for hours. After letting them go, for some reason they felt the need to prove to me they actually caught snakes. They did this by running into the house, sticking their bare hands in my face and shouting “Smell our hands! We caught snakes!” (When threatened, like me, garter snakes emit a disagreeable smelling oil which can dissuade predators but not, apparently, curious children).

I suggested they find something else to capture.

And that they did, which is why the last couple days were filled with peace, and little in the way of arguing or bickering among them. In fact for a long while they were suspiciously quiet, which prompted a casual visit by yours truly. I found them sitting amongst our large landscape boulders with a pile of grass and several live grasshoppers corralled in crude bark fences and roofs.

It appears the grasshopper wranglers were engaged in rounding up a herd so they could feed them grass. The youngest showed me how this was done by holding a grasshopper securely and forcing a piece of grass into its mouth. The insect would masticate the grass to the delight of the kids, and shortly thereafter puke up a brownish liquid, a source of great curiosity.

I’m thinking they killed a few grasshoppers with their peculiar sacrificial feast.

But I didn’t care. It was peaceful, and it didn’t matter to me how many grasshoppers had to die to preserve that peace.

By the middle of August, they were back home in the land of sidewalks and busy roads, but content with the promise made by Aunt and Uncle Sigmadog that they can come back again in a few months for winter fun (weather permitting), and again next summer for another couple weeks of snake and grasshopper wrangling.