Is That Any Way to Treat a Ladybug?
The vetch has come into bloom on the vacant lot. Withspikes of dragon-toothed flowers, it is taller than the yellow mustard weed, higher than the wild barley and the wind-dipping oats, challenging the tallest dandelion stalks, showing its purple dominance from one end of the field to the other.
It is my favorite tyrant weed; partly because of its bold purpleness, but mostly because of those upright warning spikes spearing the air, looking as dangerous as the metal prongs of a forgotten harrow.
High clouds this day, sun on the sidewalk. Also, other things--ladybugs. Lots of them, pursuing their scalloping paths in outward loops from the grassy edge onto the sidewalk. The cement must reflect and hold the heat; perhaps they like the warmth of it. Here is one tiny bug, circling round and round on top of a larger one. I am afraid the larger one is dead; there is a yellow smear under it. Another ladybug runs up. Top bug charges, if so militant a word can be applied to so small a creature, driving him away (or her--how little we know of ladybugs’ lives).
Ladybug love is in the air, for I see others all over the lot, hurrying to pair up on grass blades, on the fuzzy green cylinders of barley. This circling bug does not know her mate is dead, stepped on no doubt on the sidewalk; she should be finding a live lover.
I flick her off the bigger, still body; frantically--maybe inconsolably--she runs in zigzags. How terrible of me; I have interrupted her period of grief. Who was I to decide when a ladybug should cease mourning?
With a leaf, I move her carefully back. She does not move--now two dead bodies next to each other. What have I done--used compassion to kill.
Farther down on the sidewalk another dead ladybug; its squashed innards yellow-stains the sidewalk. But wait--if these bugs, so solidly semi-spherical in their smallness, had been stepped on they would be flattened out, wouldn’t they, not still roundly dotted on the pavement. Is it possible this is some sort of a birth process I am seeing, is the yellow not death but life--a mass of eggs? I lift its front end a little; it seems glued to the sidewalk. How is it possible to be so ignorant of processes of life that flourishes not inches from our own back doors?
But the fact remains I have killed a ladybug. Look at her, flat on her back, motionless, next her--or is it his?--mate.
A zip of a breeze and she flips over, unleashes her wings, lifts near-vertically, flits off into the field--carefree, uncaring or bound for some other bug-known duty on nature’s agenda.
Terribly relieved, I straighten up to walk along. There are fewer ladybugs out voyaging on the cement now; is it because it is cooling with the sun going lower or is the joining cycle I have seen already ended, quietly closing just one short chapter in a book too inter-related, too complicated, too large, too continuous for us, with all our scientific toys, ever to begin to understand or hope to finish?
