This morning I had to be out of the house before 7am because there’s roadwork happening on our street and we’re not allowed to park there for the next few days.

And as I’m driving slowly down the hill, past the roadworkers, something fluttered and landed on my windshield. I thought it was a leaf or a feather until I stopped at the signal and it readjusted itself. It was a grasshopper.

Grasshoppers are symbols of good luck, prosperity, and happiness. So I am ALL about a grasshopper wanting to chill with me for a bit. I took a picture of him sitting regally poised for adventure but, with my window open, I mentioned aloud that he might wanna find an exit strategy in a bit since I was about to get on the freeway.

He stayed like “I ain’t scared” and kinda nestled himself in to the wipers.

As I’m getting on the freeway, he’s totally not hopping off now and so I say “Hang on, my dude.” But it kinda felt like that scene in Clueless where they accidentally get on the freeway and scream the entire time in absolute terror.

There wasn’t as much traffic as usual because I left the house earlier, but I decided to stay in the slow lane at about 45 mph, not seeing any ideal places for him to jump off and find anything other than impending death.

I watched intently, his antennae blowing in the wind, he’s hanging on for dear life, kinda looking at me like, “What the fuck are we even doing right now??”

I wondered if this would have been a longer roadtrip how long he woulda lasted, where or how long before he jumped off? It was about 15 minutes before we got off the freeway and, at a stoplight, he hopped over the wiper under the lip of the hood. And I was like, “NO! Don’t give up now, buddy! We’re almost there and there’s a garden at my school where you can make new friends! Choose life!”

I was nervous for the next few minutes driving slow through the residential streets to campus, not knowing if he’d fallen into the engine and was incinerated. Maybe he didn’t have faith that this adversity would end soon enough. Maybe he resigned himself with a thought that this is just his life now, fast and scary and windy as hell.

I parked, got out, and circled around the hood checking the nooks and crannies for him. And there he fuckin was under the wiper, looking at me like, “What the hell WAS that even?” And I was so relieved he made it safe all that way, courageously defying the odds.

Is this a metaphor? I have no idea. I was relieved to learn from Google that grasshoppers aren’t “central place foragers” like bees and ants, so they just live their best life wherever they happen to be at the moment. I can relate to that. Me too, grasshopper, me too.