An Old Wife's Tale

An Old Wife’s Tale

Fishermen’s wives are used to waiting - waiting for the fishing boats to come back to shore, waiting for the sound of footsteps returning home. The sea is a dangerous place, and it is hard not to worry.

All they can do is wait and hope - and look for signs of good luck wherever they can…

At first, the old woman had not really noticed it, the green grasshopper that flew past her and into the house. She was standing at the open window, looking out. Night had fallen on the seashore. Only a little pale light hung in the western sky, showing where the sun had gone down.

She watched the empty boats moving up and down in the shallow water by the beach. The tide was slowly rising. All the other fishermen had returned home for the evening. Only her husband’s boat had not come in yet.

She left the window open and sat down at the dining table to wait. An oil lamp burned brightly on the table, while two empty drinking glasses shone with little points of light, like the starlit sky over the beach.

Her husband would normally be home by now, sitting at the other end of the table. He would tell her all about his adventures at sea that day. Meanwhile, they would eat the fish he had caught and brought home and she had cooked for their supper.

He would tell her proudly how far out to sea he had gone. Further out than any of the younger fishermen dared to go, because they were afraid they would be caught fishing in Venezuelan waters and would end up in a Venezuelan prison. They were even more afraid of meeting pirates who wanted to steal the engines from their boats.

But he knew the sea better than the Venezuelans or the pirates, he would tell her, so he could make his boat go faster than any of them.

‘You’re too big-headed,’ she would smile and tell him then.

‘Too big-headed,’ she cried now, although he wasn’t there to hear her, ‘to even carry a lamp on your boat. If you were robbed of your engine and left in your boat, out there on the sea all night, pushed this way and that by the wind and the waves, what would you do? If you carried a lamp, a passing big ship would see you and pick you up and not run over you.’

Through her tears, she saw the green grasshopper on the wall. A house lizard, waving its tail from side to side to confuse the grasshopper, was slowly getting closer to it. The lizard was within attacking distance when the grasshopper flew away, jumping on and off the walls, into the lampshade, and finally landing on the table.

It is said that if a green grasshopper flies into your home at night and you put a glass over it and let it go in the morning, you will have good luck and become rich. The old woman took an empty glass and put it down on the table over the green grasshopper.

And sure enough, the next morning she lifted the glass, and the green grasshopper jumped up and in a golden stream of morning light flew out of the door. It flew past her husband, who stood in the doorway with a sea-salt smile on his face and a rich basket of fish in his arms.

She lifted her head from her arms that rested on the table, and looked around. The strong morning light was painful on her eyes. Her husband still hadn’t come home. What she had seen was only a dream. She was angry with herself. How could she fall asleep at a time like this? She supposed she had slept all night.

She saw the green grasshopper still inside the glass on the table. She lifted the glass. The grasshopper remained still. She gently touched its wings. Very slowly it moved a little way away, then was still again. Suddenly its wings opened out and it was off, flying in a beautiful curving line out of the open window. And was gone.