Adding to our own particular misery was the fact that we were saddled with two three-year-olds who were picky eaters even under optimal circumstances. Minnesota cuisine is, in fact, perfectly calibrated toward the diet of a three-year-old who refuses to eat anything other than chicken nuggets and french fries. As a result I’ve given up all hope of my children becoming adventurous eaters. Several weeks ago one of the twins tried a slice of Domino’s pizza and complained that it was “too spicy.”
Minnesotans are, however, the unacknowledged masters of one culinary realm: pickling. This is in part a reflection of their heritage: in Scandinavian countries, as in Minnesota, the growing season is short and people rely heavily on canning and pickling to make summer’s flavors last through the winter.
You can’t buy real Minnesota pickled products in stores—the best pickles come directly from neighbors and friends, by the jar and bucket toward the end of summer. Our first summer here, Jim Benoit, a retiree living on the south end of town, stopped by one day with a plastic ice cream tub filled to the brim with pickles from his garden. Inside, cucumber slices soaked in a broth of vinegar, onions, garlic, and what appeared to be entire dill plants. Each bite combined salt, tartness, and crunch in perfect proportion.
We found other ways around the region’s food shortcomings. Amazon turned out to be a lifesaver—not just for “exotic” food items, like curry paste, but also for staples that we otherwise would have had to drive long distances for: diapers. Wipes. Dog food. Cat litter.
Amazon helped ease the transition from Maryland, where we were no more than twenty minutes from a store selling literally anything we needed, to Red Lake Falls, where the nearest Home Depot’s an hour away and specialty retailers are virtually nonexistent. Judging by the questions we got from some Marylanders about our move, a fair amount of city folks’ reservations about moving to the country involves difficulties of buying stuff you might currently take for granted, like clothing or toys or housewares. That might have been the case thirty years ago—moving to the country might have entailed a certain type of material deprivation for the well-heeled—but Amazon and the internet in general render those concerns more or less moot.
There were notable exceptions, however. In December 2018, for instance, we decided to add a bearded dragon lizard to the family zoo. Beardies, as they’re known, grow to about two feet in length, most of which is tail. One of them can be comfortably housed in a fifty-five-gallon aquarium. Their heads, necks, and the sides of their bodies are covered in rubbery spikes, which give them a misleadingly fierce appearance. They have a reputation for being outgoing and curious, and don’t mind being picked up and handled the way many other reptiles do. Ours, whom we named Holly, gets particularly snuggly as she’s falling asleep, and will gladly nuzzle against a warm human hand or neck or chest for comfort.
One of the first things we discovered about Holly was that she likes to eat. A lot. And the thing she loved the most when we first got her was crickets. From the get-go, I knew that keeping an ample supply of crickets on hand would require some planning. The closest pet shop, the PetSmart where we purchased her, is an hour away in Grand Forks. Restocking our cricket supply would require a time commitment of at least two hours out and back.
By Christmas Day that year, Holly’s cricket supply was running low. I decided to order crickets online, a first for me, in order to save the trip to North Dakota. I bought the crickets from Fluker Farms in Louisiana, one of the more well-established online insect vendors. There are, in fact, hundreds, perhaps thousands of websites that will ship a dazzling array of live insects directly to your home—crickets and mealworms, sure, but also more exotic fare like hornworms, silkworms, black soldier fly larvae (for example, maggots), waxworms, millipedes, roaches. But as a neophyte I opted to keep things simple: 250 crickets, which seemed like a reasonable amount for a lizard who was theoretically capable of gobbling up to fifty of them every day.
I sprang for the next-day shipping to ensure there was no gap in Holly’s cricket supply. But the package ended up getting delayed by a fierce blizzard that roared through the northern plains that week, dumping up to a foot of snow and sending temperatures plunging below zero. The cricket box ended up spending an unplanned overnight at a FedEx sorting facility in Grand Forks. I feared they would all be dead on arrival.
On Friday morning I anxiously met the FedEx delivery man at the door. He appeared to be relieved to unburden himself of the six-inch-square box emblazoned with the words “Live Insects” and decorated with life-size cricket silhouettes. We exchanged no words. If you’re a FedEx driver, you probably try to avoid conversations with the types of people who order boxes full of insects from the internet.
Having never ordered internet crickets before, I naively assumed that I’d open up the box and find the crickets in some sort of sealed bag or plastic bin to facilitate easy transfer to their final storage place in the home. I also assumed that given the near-zero temperatures we were experiencing that morning, any crickets in the box would be groggy and disoriented and easy to manage.
I was wrong on both counts.
I cut open the tape and opened the cardboard flaps and was greeted by dozens of beady little cricket eyes staring eagerly up at me. I had a brief vision of the aliens in the claw machine from Toy Story before the crickets started doing what they usually do when they are suddenly exposed to light—hopping maniacally. I quickly closed the flaps before too many escaped.
This was a conundrum. There was no immediate way for me to transfer 250 clearly active and ravenously hungry crickets from the box to the shallow plastic container we were storing them in at home. The only solution would be to grab a spare fish tank we had out in the shed (incidentally, the one we had briefly kept the doomed stray bunny in), which would take a bit of time, requiring a trip outside in the deep snow and chilling cold. Back at my desk, after all, I had a nearly finished story that was due to my editor. Rather than upend my workday for the sake of $11.50 worth of internet crickets, I decided to retape the box and store it in a secure location until I had time to deal with it.
In retrospect, this was a huge mistake.
Given the disruptive possibilities posed by the dog, the cat, and the twins, there was only one place where I thought I could put the cricket box without it getting overturned or split open: the bathroom adjacent to our kitchen. I put the crickets in the cabinet above the toilet and went back to work. For about twenty minutes, everything was quiet.
Just as I was about to file my story, I heard Briana, in the kitchen, utter the following words: “Where are all these goddamn crickets coming from?” I should point out here that I told her offhandedly that I had bought crickets online, but I hadn’t told her when they’d arrive and she hadn’t been around when FedEx came.
At this point, I reasoned that there was no crisis, that she had probably encountered one or two stray crickets that had hopped out when I initially opened the box. So I decided to keep working.
As I was making final edits to the story, I continued to hear increasingly frantic cricket-related outbursts from the kitchen. Briana later told me that she first realized something was terribly wrong when one of the cats suddenly leaped onto a pumpkin pie that had been warming on the countertop. It was going after an unusually large cricket that was munching the filling.
Eventually the commotion was too much to ignore. I went to the kitchen. Briana whipped around to face me, wild-eyed.
“So uh, remember when I said I ordered some crickets?” I said. “They got here toda—”
“Yes, I see the crickets are here,” she said. “Why are they all over the kitchen?”
“Huh,” I said. “That is weird. Let me check something.” I walked over to the bathroom. I opened the door.
There were crickets. Everywhere.
Crickets on the floor. Crickets on the walls. Crickets in the sink. Crickets in the toilet. A clump of at least twelve crickets were attempting to cram themselves underneath the baseboard. A cr
icket jumped at me from the stack of folded washcloths on the shelf. Two crickets appeared to be chasing each other around the plunger. The crickets in the toilet were propelling themselves around the bowl at an astonishing speed.
For some reason my first instinct was to flush the toilet, as if that would do anything to solve the problem of crickets in all the other places that were not the toilet. I shut the door. “Uh, don’t come in here!” I yelled. My voice was unnaturally high from trying to force myself to sound nonchalant and cheerful.
Evidently, I had not resealed the box as well as I should have. Later inspection also revealed that in my haste to ascertain the crickets’ condition, I had opened the box from the wrong side, despite the presence of large arrows indicating the proper side with an all-caps warning that read,
SEE INSIDE FLAP FOR CARE INSTRUCTIONS!
There was nothing to do now but execute the Spare Fish Tank Protocol on an emergency basis. I threw on my boots, ran out to the shed, and grabbed the spare tank. I brought it back to the bathroom, threw the box inside it, and began scooping up the strays wherever I could find them.
Roughly forty-five minutes later, the bathroom was clear. But in the interim, the earlier escapees had begun migrating elsewhere. There were crickets in the kitchen closet. Crickets in a pile of shoes. Crickets making their way downstairs to the kids’ playroom. The cats were in a state of high alert, having what I can only imagine was the greatest day of their lives.
I tried to collect all of them. It was like the world’s shittiest game of Pokémon. Well after the initial cleanup concluded, crickets kept turning up in inconvenient locations throughout the day. They were in the playroom and under the couch. At one point I heard Charles shout gleefully from the bathroom, “There’s another cricket in the toilet!”
We did, eventually, round up all or nearly all of them, although I imagine there’s still a contingent of them lurking in the kitchen closet to this day. Several days afterward, Briana approached me in the kitchen with a grave look on her face.
“The crickets made me realize something about you,” she said.
“Uh-oh,” I said.
“It’s always been crickets in the bathroom with you. Always.”
“I . . . don’t follow?”
“It’s the way you do things. You try to do the right thing, but you just . . . don’t try enough.” She opened a kitchen cupboard, where I had jammed all the Tupperware in a chaotic jumble. “Crickets in the bathroom,” she said. She pointed near the door, where I had taken off my wet snow pants, jacket, and mittens and left them on the floor. “Crickets in the bathroom.” She walked me to our bedroom closet, where I had placed a pile of dirty laundry on the door of the laundry chute, but hadn’t bothered to actually open the door and toss the clothes all the way down. “Crickets in the bathroom.” She walked me back to the living room. “Charles, come here,” she said. Charles ambled over.
“Who dressed you today, Charles?” she asked.
“Daddy!”
She turned to me. “What color are his socks?”
I looked. One dark red with astronauts, the other dark blue with dinosaurs. “Well, at least they’re both—”
“Crickets in the bathroom,” she said.
I didn’t expect the bearded dragon to prompt a profound shift in how we understood the dynamics of our marriage, but here we were.
After the great cricket escape, I switched to a live dragon food that was slower-moving, not prone to jumping, incapable of climbing slick surfaces, and not prone to chirping in the middle of the night. In mid-January the FedEx guy brought the first shipment, of many, of these wondrous new bugs. I brought the box in, placed it on the kitchen table, and opened it up.
“Aha!” I said. “See, these come in a plastic container inside the box! No risk of escape!”
“What are they?” Briana asked, coming over for a closer look.
“Roaches!” I popped off the top, revealing dozens of brown, scuttling creatures in a pulsating mass.
She looked me dead in the eye, turned around, and walked out of the room without saying a word.
To think that, had we still been back in Maryland, with a Petco right up the road, none of this would have happened.
As of this writing we are still married.
Chapter 6
But I’m getting ahead of myself now. Back to that first summer. One of the visitors to our home was a poofy long-haired orange cat. It showed up in the yard one day, got chased up a tree by Tiber, and yowled until I came over to rescue it. It followed me around for the rest of the day, and subsequently started coming over to visit every day.
The cat was extremely friendly and appeared to be fairly healthy, so it was evidently being cared for by someone. But nobody in the neighborhood seemed to know who. Jason Brumwell remarked that it had often sat at the bus stop with the kids in the mornings during the school year. Melissa Benoit said it had gotten itself into their basement one summer and was stuck there for an unknown length of time. When she finally freed it, it stuck around, so Melissa offered the cat some food, which it ate ravenously.
The cat started sleeping at our house: it had to be shooed out of the garage in the evenings, and we’d find it curled up on the rocking chair on the porch first thing in the mornings. We started feeding it. One afternoon when a particularly fierce thunderstorm rolled through town, accompanied by a tornado siren, we made sure to scoop it up from outside and bring it downstairs to the basement to huddle with the children, our pets, and us as we waited for the all-clear. From that day forth it assumed it had the right to enter the house whenever it pleased, and started pawing at the window of my office and yowling whenever it saw me in there.
Whether we liked it or not, the cat appeared to be adopting us as its owners. We called it Orange Cat, because everyone in the neighborhood just referred to it as “the orange cat.” Orange Cat was shockingly gregarious, and unlike our skittish gray cat Ivy, who had always been terrified of the twins, Orange Cat would let them pet her and didn’t flinch whenever they came trundling over shouting “kitty!” at the top of their lungs. I also hold certain beliefs about orange cats vis-à-vis cats of different colors, stemming from my childhood: we had a fat orange cat named Butterscotch who had a bobtail and was the best cat any boy could hope for. He wasn’t shy, he loved to play, he sought out the company of people. While I do not have any hard evidence to back this up, I firmly believe that orange cats possess certain genetic traits that make them cooler and generally more bad-ass than other cats. Nearly every veterinary clinic I’ve been to, for instance, has a clinic cat that just loafs about the place and generally gives zero fucks about anything: those cats, in my experience, are almost always orange cats. When we lived in Vermont, our neighbors had an enormous orange cat named “Compton” for his general street smarts and devil-may-care attitude. Garfield? Orange cat. Morris, of Nine Lives fame? Orange cat. Captain Marvel’s Goose? Orange cat. Winston Churchill had an orange cat, named Jock, he loved so much that after his death, his family insisted that an orange cat be kept at Chartwell, his estate, in perpetuity.
We developed an understanding with our own Orange Cat: we would provide her food and shelter in the garage, as needed, and in return she would make herself available for pets and chin scritches to all members of the Ingraham household. She happened to be a ferocious hunter, and as a deal sweetener she took to leaving decapitated bats and choice mouse organs for us on the porch.
Everything was fine up until the day I got a text message from Heather Wallace, one of Jason’s sisters: “Trouble on Facebook, you better take a look.”
Indeed there was. Heather had attached a screen shot of a neighbor’s Facebook status, someone I realized I still hadn’t met. “Love it the new people that wrote a bad review on red lake falls moved next door to me,” the guy wrote. “Today he come into my yard and steels [sic] my plums off my tree wow and I have never meet [sic] him some balls.”
Wait, what?
“Not to menti
on feeds and houses our cat, that she no longer comes home,” a woman, who appeared to be his wife, wrote in reply.
“Go tell him to quit feeding her,” a friend of theirs offered.
“I’m going over there tomorrow,” the woman said, rather ominously from where I was sitting.
Hoo boy. This was it, I thought. Finally. The good people of Red Lake Falls were ready to peel back the veneer of Minnesota Nice. Shit was about to get real. You expect a certain amount of gossip in a small town—the fact that everybody knows everybody else’s business is one of rural life’s challenges and charms. I was ready for it. But accusations of plum theft? That was something else entirely.
The couple in question, I soon learned, lived across the back alley from us, next door to the Presbyterian church. We hadn’t met them because the husband, Danny, worked on gas and oil pipelines and had been off in the Dakotas for most of the summer. His wife, Missy, and their two small kids had been with them. But they had left their cat in the care of Larry, our older neighbor across the street, for the summer, and Larry had let it freely wander the neighborhood. Now they were back in town and their cat didn’t want to come home.
The allegation about the plum tree was a mystery, to say the least. I had never been over to their house. The only thing I could think was that I had spent some time in the alley trimming back some of the overgrown brush from our lawn—maybe someone had seen me there and through the game of small-town telephone, “trimming brush in the alley” had transformed into “stealing plums from the neighbors”?
If You Lived Here You'd Be Home by Now Page 11
