Insects And The Single Girl:
Part I, In Which Bob Dances The Flamenco
By Robin Ford Wallace
Behold, Gentle
Reader, the figure atop yonder hill, silhouetted by the sinking sun. Head thrown back against the flaming sky,
both hands raised, leg bent at knee, the shadow claps and stamps as if in time
to some unheard rhythm.
Is this some character of romance? Some doomed soprano of Italian opera? Some flamenco dancer with flashing black
eyes and rose between teeth?
Hello? It’s me,
Reader. You were expecting maybe Carmen
Miranda?
No, this is not an opera, it’s Bob’s Little Acre,
where roses abound but where no one chews on them but the Japanese
beetles. Then what, you may ask, is all
this happy horse patootie about dancing?
It happened like this:
Some
readers know your humble narrator only as that fun-loving farm girl who fills
both lawnmowers and frosty mugs with yellow fluids that come from cans. They may be surprised to learn that their
HN’s day job as a crusading journalist keeps her locked in a constant death
struggle between the forces of darkness and the keen brave light of
civilization.
Not the worst job
I’ve had, honey, I used to wait tables, but the thing about your classic
battles between Good and Evil is sometimes a girl loses them. Faithful readers will know which one I mean,
so I won’t beat that horse, though I may not be able to resist the occasional
waspish rejoinder. Oh no! Here one comes now:
Golly! I wish I were as smart as those
people who don’t need libraries!
CLAP! CLAP!
CLAP!
And
that, Gentle Reader, is the first part of our flamenco. It’s something I learned from one of those
self-help-for-psychos columns. Brace
yourself for a backlash of positivity:
Happiness is a
choice! Self-pity is a disease! We forgive those who wrong us not because
they deserve forgiveness but because bitterness gives us those ugly
lines around the mouth.
Yes, Gentle
Reader, I used to sneer at this kind of crap, too, but adversity has made me a
believer. Rage and indignation must be
pleasurable on some level, because we find them as hard to give up as
cigarettes or heroin; but in the end they do us just as much good. How much healthier to banish wrath and sail
through life with a beatific smile that repels anger, spreads goodwill and
smoothes out the flaws in our lipstick!
Still, hard as a
girl tries to be Ms. Sunshine, negative emotions do creep in. When that happens, what the psycho advisor
says is: Clap your hands at them until
they go away.
Laugh if you will,
GR, it works! Since I learned this
trick, I’ve clapped away enough rage to fill Sing-Sing. Yes, one gets mistaken for an epileptic, and
yes, people who annoy one sometimes think one’s applauding them; but it is
simpler to deal with stares of incredulity than murder charges.
Here, though, is
another thing about your classic battles between Good and Evil: Anger comes in
dead handy. I remember from my
formative years the gently contemplative look on David Carradine’s face as he
sailed through the air in slo mo, kicking bad-guy butt on Kung Fu;
but me personally, when I’m storming the gates of Hell I’ll take the grapes of
wrath over the milk of human kindness every time. Anyhow, how’s a girl supposed to feel as she watches those
in charge of education marauding through town like Cossacks, banning books,
closing libraries, stamping out the keen brave light of civilization wherever
it –
CLAP! CLAP!
CLAP!
Well, you see the
problem. These past few months I’ve
been clapping more or less full-time, determined to return to the serene earth
mamahood you used to see depicted so winsomely on bottles of Herbal Essence
shampoo. How ironic, then, to find when
I limped home in defeat:
War! It was high summer, and while I was off
storming Hell, insects had swarmed in to occupy my acre of Heaven.
Armies of
ants! Waves of weevils! Squadrons of squishy squirmers that
squiggled from the squash, eliciting from your narrator a high-pitched
“EEEEEEEEE!”
Sorry. There’s something about the larval life
stage that brings out a girl’s girlie side.
But here’s the
thing about your classic battles between girl and insect: You can’t win. Of the billions of pounds of insecticide used in agriculture,
only a tiny percentage ever makes contact with an actual bug. So why poison fish, birds and
ourselves?
Still, there are
limited-engagement measures the gardener can take. This spring, I used floating row covers for my squash, and they
really did prevent borers from inflicting sudden death. The name sounds graceful and
science-fictiony, but really they’re just cheesecloth-like sheets you keep over
your plants from seed to blossom, in my case weighted down at the sides with
rocks and propped up in the middle by a volunteer potato plant. It looked like Tobacco Road but my
squash was still there in August to be invaded by the squishy squirmers.
Also this year I
proved my friend Mary’s trick for killing ants: Dawn dishwashing liquid, the blue kind. What’s funny is the label says, “Dawn saves wildlife,” when with
just a couple of squirts in a gallon of water you can commit multiple
genocides.
For Japanese
beetles, it is meanly satisfying to hard-prune your roses and burn the
clippings. For other bugs – well,
there’s always the other part of our flamenco:
STOMP! STOMP!
STOMP!
Which brings us,
with sick inevitability, to our concluding metaphor: that in life we stomp what
we can and clap at the rest. If it’s a
war, we mostly lose it; but I’d rather think of it as a flamenco. It sucks but a girl keeps trying, backwards
and in high heels.
So. May I have this dance?
END
