Even though they are not immediately visible, there is one in every room: a bug jar. I'm often arrested with ambivalence when pondering end of life decisions for those annoying little creatures with strong survival instincts. My relationship with insects is complicated, but I am committed to taking them outdoors where they belong. In my house “grab and go” has little to do with take out; it's always about the bugs. 

 

My awe and aversion coexist awkwardly; my urge to scream is rapidly overridden by my compulsion to rescue.  A quick Wikipedia search reveals there are approximately 1.4 billion insects for each human on the planet.  Clearly I'm going to need bigger jars. 

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Beguiled by their simplicity and complexity, I love to watch them. I respect their purpose-driven lives, their social order, and their blatant indifference to the nuances of the tedious but requisite duties of day-to day life. Remarkable. 

 

Scream provoking, icky and essential.

 

Complicated. 

 

I admire their sheer beauty, which I prefer to observe in The Field Guide to Insects on my coffee table rather than up close; if they’re inside my house, they’re going out.  

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I've become adept at catching them. I can catch a fly mid-flight and have learned how to "grab and go" quickly, especially those gladiator-shield adorned stink bugs, their top heavy bodies struggling for balance while latched precariously to the lid of my bug jar. 

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But not all of them make it to the jar. In my eagerness to save every single bug that ventures into my home, I have sadly beheaded some and inadvertently amputated scores of body parts on others. Many have perished or frozen to death once outside and mercy deaths have certainly occurred. But many survived.  

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When I was younger it was different. 

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Tent caterpillars were ubiquitous on Long Island in the summers in the 50s and 60s. Their gauzy white incubators, inverted silky protractors braced in the fork of a branch, swaddled sticky creatures at right angles in the crooked elbows of many trees.

 

Encased in the opaque stillness of their womb-like nests, they rolled around en masse, rambunctious yarn balls with hairy legs, slithering from one internal chamber to the next before parachuting down and defoliating all the beautiful trees.

 

As the sun heated up, a cavalcade of caterpillars descended in unison in search of tender leaves.  Others dangled from invisible strands swinging recklessly from tree to tree or worse than death, landing in our hair.

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The streets and sidewalks were stained with a kaleidoscope of brightly colored caterpillar innards as ten-year-old feet bedecked with PF Flyers gleefully squished them into oblivion. What fun we had discovering the brilliant, crayola-like secrets contained within their lifeless bodies.  

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It didn’t seem cruel.  We just wanted to see what color butterfly was about to emerge and at that age, patience wasn’t a default setting. Besides, if we didn’t squish them, the sharp beaked robins and starlings would peck them to pieces anyway or sometimes mercifully swallow them whole.

 

As the sun lost its heat, the caterpillars returned to the safety of their cocoons.  Soon after, the men arrived with big, dented gas cans. Tall skinny ladders, bespeckled with dried paint and caked with chalky chlordane residue leaned uneasily on the bruised beleaguered trees as the men set the nests on fire with torches made of oily rags.

 

The smell of scorched bark stained our throats as ghostly fibers and caterpillar- confetti exploded in flimsy gossamer filaments hurling gobs of bugs to a fiery fall.

 

Armageddon. 

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Contemplations about mortality and the essential eternal consequences of our earthly actions occur more frequently as we age, and now I sometimes wonder if they're there, those icky interlopers, lining that brilliantly lighted sacred space at the end of that long tunnel - all of those annoying, essential, beautiful little creatures whose lives I've spared, miraculously reassembled and beholden to me for my lifesaving interventions. 

 

Except for the caterpillars. I had forgotten about those caterpillars... 

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