That summer an army of crickets  started a war with my father. Dad cared for insects no more than Mamma, but he could tolerate a few living in the basement. Mamma was a city girl and she said a cricket was just too noisy. Then to support her point she wouldn't go to bed. She drank coffee and smoked my father's cigarettes and paced between the sofa and the TV. Next morning she threatened to pack up and leave, so Dad drove to the store and hurried back. He sprayed poison from a jug. When he was finished he told us that was the end of it. For a couple of weeks we went back to find dead crickets in the laundry. He suggested that we'd all be better off to hide as many as we could from Mamma. I fed a few dozen to the cat who I didn't like because he scratched for no reason. However,soon live crickets started showing up in the kitchen and bathroom. Mamma was upest because she thought they were the dead crickets coming back,but Dad said these were certainly new ones. He fetched his jug of posion and sprayed all over until the whole house smelled of posion, and then he sprayed the basement again. A couple of weeks later, when both live and dead crickets kept turning up, Dad emptied the basement of junk. Then he burned a lot of old newspapers and magazines which he said the crickets had turned into nests. While we ate supper that evening, the wind lifted some flames onto the wood pile. The only gasoline was in the lawn mower's  fuel tank but that was enough to create an explosion big enough to reach the house. Once the roof caught, there wasn't much anyone could do. After the fire trucks left, Mamma took the others to Aunt Gail's. I helped Dad and Uncle Burt carry things out of the house and pile them by the road. We worked into the night and we didn't talk much, while all around the noise of crickets broke our silence. The author's father burned the old newspapers and magazines because he thought   _  .
they were no longer useful the crickets were afraid of fires they became the home of crickets the dead crickets came back to life