Entomophile

I am the kind of City Girl who will call a friend on the phone or the guy from across the hall to come and deal with anything creepy crawly.  Or I'll let my mom do it.  Her OCD is allayed for just a few moments as she scrambles across tabletops or counters on the kitchen to swat a pesky fly.  I can't kill flies and I definitely will not kill spiders.  I will find a Tupperware and piece of paper and scoot the insect into the trap and let it go outside.  My inner Zen monk comes out around insects.

It's not that I am horrified at the idea of killing living things.  I will step on ants.  I used to get great joy out of it as a child, stomping on lines creeping around the sidewalk and watching them scatter in confused loops.  I also enjoy killing fleas.  I remember a particularly bad summer as a child when my cat was host to their party and I would walk around with knee-length white socks waiting for them to jump on me.  Then, I would get great satisfaction out of picking them off my socks and filling the toilet with their scrambling bodies.

Ants and fleas are the general exception to my killing of insects, but I don't kill insects, mostly, because I've been terrified of them.  I spaz out when a bee flies within a foot of me.  I'll marvel at a grasshopper or cricket, but jump faster than they do if they move.

Needless to say, my first few weeks in the country were a challenge.  No, actually,  I was entomo-challenged for at least the first month: constantly swatting, flicking, scooting and scratching.  I was a goddam buffet for the mosquitoes, the chiggers, noseeums and any of the other many, many biting insects.  After complaining to Judd's boyfriend, Argent--a quiet-spoken, observant gentleman who's lived in the country most of his life, he commented to me that tolerating insects is simply a way of learning how to deal with the irritations of life.  I am easily annoyed and irritated.  I thought about our conversation for some time and realized that maybe that's one of my lessons right now: to learn how to deal with the irritations of life, and not be bothered by them--not to scratch or pick at them, to not get flustered and reactive when they occur.

I am also learning how to appreciate all of them for their inherent, individual beauty and function.  I've seen some of the most incredible insects since I've been here: an array of butterflies, dragonflies the size of my hand, fireflies that put on a nightly show in the trees, the most curious creature with a burgundy body, short black wings and a beak-like tendril that dipped into the stigma of the flowers it fed off of one-by-one like a hummingbird.  The most amazing insect I've seen is the lunar moth.  It's as large as my hand and looks like a creature from faery tales.  It looks like it could glow-in-the-dark.

The longer I stay here, the more I like bugs and think they're pretty cool.