Reflections 1 – I remember the warm, balmy nights of late spring and summer, and a young boy with skinny legs and baggy shorts listening with wonder to the song of the crickets somewhere beneath the ground. It amazed me that as I approached them attempting to find them beneath leaves or wherever they happened to be hiding, that they would fall silent.
One day I discovered that if I walked very softly I could locate the crickets burrow and with a quick stomp of my foot I could stop the song. This was a great game and the song nearly always began again. One day the grandfather of the girls next door was visiting them. He was obviously watching me creep around the garden stomping on cricket songs but as he was hidden by a screen of shrubs alond the common fence, I did not see him. Suddenly a deep gruff voice yelled at me across the fence.
“Why are you killing those crickets? What have they ever done to you?”
I was ashamed. I didn’t know that stomping on cricket sounds would kill crickets. I didn’t even know what a cricket looked like. From that day on, although the sounds still fascinated me, I tread warily near the cricket burrows and never stomped on one again.
This is for the Friday flashback meme – albeit a week late!
These Days 
Random Magus said,
July 14, 2007 at 1:16 am
Your post reminded me of one of my favorite lines
‘… Tread softly because you tread on my dreams’. W.B. Yeats
Loz said,
July 14, 2007 at 3:35 am
And it was William Cowper who said –
“I would not enter in my list of friends, Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm. An inadvertent step may crush the snail That crawls at evening in the public path, But he has the humanity, forewarned, Will tread aside, and let the reptile live.”
Blur Ting said,
July 15, 2007 at 10:31 am
Nice story. Reminds me of my kids when they were little. they used to bring butterflies home and put them in a tank, thinking they’re protecting them. Of course they wouldn’t stay alive for very long.
They soon realise that and started growing plants that attract butterflies in the garden instead. Now we have a garden full of plants with caterpillars on them.
Cuckoo said,
July 16, 2007 at 12:56 pm
So innocent. We all have done something or the other to remember.