I got a little brown box in the mail today, and it immediately made me feel a wonderful sense of renewal and anticipation and happiness. As they say, good things come in small packages. Evidently, they also come in unassuming and unexpected ones.
It's been a very stormy couple of months. After a mild and relatively rain-free winter, now that the schedule of horse activities is in full swing for the 2012 year, the weather has decided to make up for lost time. We've had unprecedented rainfall, and my ranchito is largely underwater. This morning, when I slogged out to the lake of a pasture to feed my goats, high winds nearly ripped the barn doors off and scattered the hay to kingdom come. The horses stand in stalls, heads down, blanketed, bored and itchy, their saturated hooves breeding fungus. Their soaking wet stalls are difficult to clean, and we have to gear up for protection against the elements with hooded slickers and tall rubber boots. The chicken eggs when we collect them are muddy and are even harder to clean than the stalls. The dogs track mud in, and we clean it up so they can ask to go out awhile later and start the process all over again.
And then, like the sun breaking through the clouds, came the little brown box. What could it contain, you wonder, that could be so thrilling?
The little brown box is just full--of--insect larvae. Bugs. Fly predators, to be exact.
This is the kind of stuff I get excited about.
You have to understand: flies are a REAL PROBLEM when you have horses. They accumulate and multiply at an alarming rate, and are very annoying and harmful to humans and equines alike. They bite! And it hurts! They carry germs and disease from feces to animals and cause wound and eye infections. Flies are not fun to have around.
Enter the tiny but very important, helpful fly predators. They arrive in my mailbox as larvae, and as soon as they begin to hatch, I hang their box out by the horse stalls, where they can do their job. They quickly and efficiently locate any fly eggs or larvae and lay their own eggs on them; when the young fly predators hatch out, they do just what their name suggests and prey on the developing flies, killing them and stopping the fly reproduction cycle in its tracks. These little guys work hard, and having them around works! Visitors to my barn comment gratefully on the relative absence of flies.
I appreciate bugs. They have a role to play in the balance of nature. Much to my children's chagrin, I don't kill spiders; I capture and remove them from the house. My daughter complains that they'll just come back in, while I remind her that there's nothing for them to eat inside and they're much more likely to remain out where they can hunt all the other bugs.
My tolerance for bugs has led to some . . . incidences. Once, while visiting my husband's aunt Lorie and her boyfriend, Bob, I glanced over to the side of the couch on which I was sitting and commented, "Oh, there's a scorpion." Bob leapt to his feet like he was on fire and grabbed a large catalogue, and I quickly said, "Wait, do you have a jar? If you hit it, it might escape, but I can catch it." He looked at me like I was from Mars and swung at the offender, who promptly escaped. You can't squash a scorpion on a soft surface. Eventually he did fetch a jar and I caught it. (I'm pretty good at catching things in jars.) The minute I had it contained, Bob grabbed the jar and headed for the door.
"Wait!" I said once again, "I'll let the kids look at it close up before we let it go."
And again he stared at me incredulously. "Are you nuts? I'm killing it before it bites somebody!"
It was his home.
A couple of hours later, we all went down to the local restaurant for some dinner. While we were eating outdoors on the lovely summer evening, a large beetle landed on my head. (And I mean LARGE, this was in Florida.) All eyes became glued to me as a couple of the girls screeched, evidently frightening the beetle, who stumbled onto my mashed potatoes and lay there on his back, waving his legs frantically.
"Silly thing," I scolded and, hoping to make light of the whole incident and move on quickly, scooped up the beetle and tossed him into a nearby azaelea bush.
Returning to my seat, I caught an expression of pure horror on Bob's round red face. "What is it with you, lady?" he hissed, like I was a witch or something.
Ah, the perils of being an environmentalist in this world.
Then there was the time I allowed my children to keep a black widow and her egg sac to observe until the hatching. I'd trapped her in a jar and left her there, securely lidded and safely contained, overnight, during which time she miraculously spun and laid her ball of eggs. This was a rare opportunity, but I misjudged the size of the hatchlings. One morning, as we all sat reading, baby black widows, which happen to be white and nearly microscopic, poured out of the screen atop the jar and out into my living room. I shooed the children into another room, grabbed the vacuum and cleaned feverishly, reassuring myself that chances of more than one surviving were minimal, anyway, since they are voracious and cannibalistic. I'm happy to say, no one but black widows were harmed in the unfolding or aftermath of this story.
So, back to the little brown box of bugs. It's arrival was indeed exactly like the sun breaking through the clouds, because fly predators begin to arrive in my mailbox in the spring and continue to arrive monthly all throughout the warm summer months. Collecting that box from my mailbox brought up a whole array of feelings, the way smelling pine trees makes you feel Christmassy, or smelling coffee in the morning makes it easier to get out of bed. Just holding that box in my hands let me start feeling those long summer days of warmth, sunshine and horseback riding.
And now, magically, as I've been writing this, the clouds outside the window have begun to blow away, and the sun is shining. But what's most amazing, all the bare black trees on my oak-wooded property have decided to burst into bloom and are sparkling, wet and green, like emeralds.
Thanks, little brown box.
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