Groundsite Image Gallery
The Locust
Artist: Jost, Lora
Date: 1999
Medium: clayboard
Height: 0.000"
Width: 0.000"
Keywords: insects, plague
“We were in, it’s been fourteen years ago, we had, our second son had cancer. So I spent five months down in Kansas City in the Med Center. And while we were there, there were these grandmothers, older women—(Laurie) And men—(Bill) And men that would come in every day and give the parents a break. And they’d rock their babies or read them a story, or whatever—I mean they did this every day so that the parents could get away. And this lady that came to our room, she’d lived in Kansas City her whole life, and she was an African American lady. And I had gone home on the weekend and so she came in Monday. And I was telling her how—it’s stressful being there anyway—and then to come home and leave your child—in one way it was stressful but in another I had to get away or I’d go crazy. And I was telling her, ya know, about the locust—(Laurie) Sitting out in the evening—(Bill) Listening to the locust because it was summertime—it was May through September when I was down there. And I was telling her, you know, how lovely the stars—there’s just millions of ’em—cause where we are—it’s just dark so you can see just billions of stars. And she—she said to me, she said, well what does a locust sound like? In her whole life, in her whole life, she didn’t know what a locust sounded like—she’d never heard one. (Laurie) But if you listen—(Bill) And I thought, you know, you—what you’ve missed. (Laurie) When we were walking to the Ronald McDonald House, back and forth in the evening, if we listened, you could hear ’em in amongst all the traffic noise—(Bill) Because we knew what we were listening for. But she didn’t know that that was a locust. (Laurie) But you’re out where it’s quiet and they just fill the air. And down there it was just more—(Bill) Well there’s traffic noise and all that with it, and so you don’t even hear it. You know, you just blend all those sounds together unless you know what you’re listening for. Anyways, she didn’t know, and I just thought, how sad, how sad not to know what a locust sounds like all by itself. But she’d never left the city.” (Laurie) —Bill and Laurie Tobald, Farmers, Glasco, KS 12/15/99