My wife loves anything stylish – even insects. Ladybugs, butterflies, and dragonflies (as long as they don’t get too close) are chic in her mind.

Disney created a cute, wise cricket, but the cave crickets that hop around in our basement are beyond a Disney makeover. How bad are cave crickets? They are notoriously known as “sprickets,” because they look like nature got drunk and combined a spider and cricket.

Sprickets can jump. High. Like waist high.

When disturbed, they take off like turbo-charged popcorn and they tend to hang out in gangs.

My first month in my house, I was humbled by these sprickets. Checking the basement door lock in the evening brought me in conflict with rows of cave crickets lined up like several airplanes coming in for a landing. I’d freeze, consider my manhood—then surrender that manhood by going back upstairs, outside, and around back to check the lock from the non-spricket side.

While I do loathe sprickets, I’m not a bug killer like my cats and my wife. I’ve got this whole Zen thing going on: I have no right to destroy nature. Or maybe it’s my Quaker education: there is that of God in everyone—even an organism that inspired a Misfits album cover.

My wife sentences any bug that doesn’t pass her style test to death. The cats do her bidding, and she expects me to do the same.

When a spricket does venture upstairs, makes it past the cats who sometimes don’t feel like dealing with it, I quietly transport it outside, as if we are hiding from a tyrannical Queen.

“Do as I say and you’ll make it out of here.”

Meanwhile, my wife litters the basement with those mean sticky traps, Medieval slabs of cardboard iced over with a layer of glue. Sprickets (or anything else) that take a wrong step become prisoners of that layer of glue. It is a bad way to go, a slow death.

I recently spotted the first cave cricket of this season in our front hallway. It must have been a juvenile because of its size and cavalier behavior, loitering in plain view like a teenager smoking on a storefront.

Little did I know this spricket might have sparked a change in my wife.

She informed me that she, too, saw “the first Spricket of the summer” in the front hallway. I awaited instructions.

“Well. I mean it was just a baby,” she said.

I jumped at the opportunity.

“So, maybe I should just put it outside?”

“Yeah. Put it outside.”

I’m hoping this trailblazing spricket inadvertently saved the lives of ants, moths and other bugs that don’t appeal to my wife. But I won’t hold my breath.