⚡ January 16, 2018
Great and Small 🐞
We all live in our own cosy worlds, little circles of light and activity, repeated round and round until fate steps in. There is a stinkbug on my lampshade, and I am uneasy.
It’s great when you get everything just so-so: my rooster fan and scrunchies are at the ready when the next hot flash comes; pins and needles are snug and we’re watching Planet Earth on the wall screen. It’s all instinct and urges, food and love and nesting materials. There are flamingos dancing in a group, grizzlies using trees as stripper poles, and yes, there is a Halyomorpha halys, the lowly East Coast stinkbug delivered here with goods from China, a potential Dreamer on foreign soil, circling the winter white world of my lampshade.
Oddly, they were not in Pennsylvania when we lived here in our youth, but they were here when we came back from California, and they were the talk of the town. Newcomers who smelled really bad, who served no appreciable purpose, procreated at will and basically made pests of themselves. Just one of the many costs of doing business on the world’s stage. But in the several years since we’ve been back, I’ve watched the stinkbug transform itself into the benign shade-walker you see here.
At first they would dive bomb at your head or the computer screen and they were to be despised for that, but they have always been easy to capture in a tissue and placed gently outside, or vacuumed. They are lumbering and slow as dust, so disposal is your psychological choice. Over time, most of them have stopped dive-bombing and instead they now keep to the edges of things, quietly just being brown and icky, and then wander off to die in the somewhere behind.
This particular bug turned out to be a hot-tea diver, the second of the year. Lucky for me, it was the dreg-ends of the cup, never again to reach human lips … unlike the first memorable Halyomorpha. Life is thrilling; life is hard here on Planet Earth. 🐔