bugged

I had forgotten, in Berlin, about bugs, about wild bugs (not the domesticated pests that feed on our clothes or our filth or our mistakes, like the carpet beetles that pestered my poor neighbor in Schöneberg).  Lightning bugs never floated in front of my bike at night, I don't remember ever hearing cicadas on evening runs in Tiergarten, and even the crickets chirped anemically, as though it were already late September.

But here in the Lowcountry, bugs are the story of summer, and I don't just mean the mosquitos.  The thick air, the heavy tree canopy of live oaks and dense underbrush of palms and pine needles and unidentifiable scrub, the gator-ridden swamps and the clear green salt marshes, the semitropical winters: this is bug paradise.

Bugs greeted me upon arrival.  Driving down the highway this afternoon, I looked at the passenger's side of the rental car and found a dragonfly calmly surveying my suitcase from atop the dashboard.  He had disappeared by the time I arrived here, but as I carried my groceries up the stairs, I witnessed in a spider's net a terrible struggle to the death.  I could hardly make out the trapped insect - was it a wasp? a fly? please don't let it be a daddy-longlegs - through the wisps and shadows, but I could tell that it was fighting desperately, frantically.  For a brief second, I considered knocking the web apart, but even as I hesitated, a spider scurried toward the thrashing silk.  I turned away, couldn't bear to look, went back to the car, thought, And why should I have denied a spider its meal? why must I be such a weakhearted yuppie?, felt guilty anyway (yes, really), came back up the stairs, found the web motionless, felt ashamed.  The spider had won.

Bugs do not always seem so brutal.  As I child, I delighted in collecting the translucent cicada skins discarded on dogwood branches, and carefully lined them up on their crisp brown ghost feet in my windowsill; I was happy to cohabit with them, inside and out.  At dusk tonight, I looked across the pond and heard the swell of cicadas, loud and fast like castanets outside my window, and felt reassured.  As I write from the back porch, a gnat climbs my computer screen.  There is nothing better, you know, than to sit on a screened porch on a summer evening, safe from the mosquitos drifting outside, and to see the surprised little faces of moths pressed up against the mesh, wings fluttering.  (I sometimes wonder about these crazed insects worshipping porch lights and whipping around street lamps in mad death spirals: what did they do before electricity lit up their nights?  Were they calmer without this glowing drug?  And what do they do when I suddenly turn off the light?)

I appreciate bugs.  - I say this even though my feminism ends exactly at the point at which a cockroach darts across the floor.  (As has happened occasionally in New York.  Then again, here in the South, they have the euphemistic term "palmetto bug" - because, as I always say, if they called them "flying winged cockroaches," who would come to visit?  One time, in the un-air-conditioned mugginess of a North Carolina dorm, I called my friend shrieking about the "palmetto bug" that was flinging itself around my room, bumping into the eaves, careening dangerously toward my head.  He very nicely took a midnight bus across campus, arriving just as I flung my shoe desperately, clumsily, and hit the thing.)

- No, really, gardening has made me appreciate bugs, has allowed me even to imbue them - some of them - with the consciousness and feelings that I so ridiculously ascribe to the non-human and the inanimate: the pig who must not be eaten, the worn teddy bear who must not be tossed, the supermarket lobsters bound with rubber bands and forced to wait for scalding deaths, the poor goldfish bored by endless cruises around the same goddamn too-small tank - and that doomed insect caught in the spider's web.   Cockroaches aside, there is room for bugs in the garden, you need bugs in the garden, and this reliance, this forced togetherness, has brought, for me, an appreciation of them and even a lessening of my typical squeamishness.  In the late spring, I buy those small plastic containers in which hundreds of ladybugs swarm over wood shavings, and empty them, at dusk, into the flower beds.  I warily tolerate spiders in the garden as I do nowhere indoors.  (Outside now in their webs hang enormous black-and-yellow spiders, arms overhead like skydivers perpetually in free-fall.)  While it may not be true that peonies rely on ants to help open their buds, I am grateful enough to tolerate the occasional ant journeying through the cabbage-like blooms on my desk.  And, of course, there can be no garden without bees.  I have come to plant certain perennials - bee balm and nepeta and sedum - just because I know that bees like them, as you might prepare a favorite meal for a guest.  In our rooftop Chelsea garden, I used to joke that they were my "city pets," and enjoyed watching the big furry backs of the bumble bees as they clambered and tumbled and smeared themselves gloriously and messily with pollen.  Bees really do not waste a moment of the day, or a day of the year (as I stand there like a fool, watching them), and they are prodigiously socially organized.  The hive has thrown out the male worker-bees for the winter, my mother's beekeeper friend told her last week.  Bees: deliberate and rational and unsympathetic, all qualities of which I have a pronounced deficit.  "For God's sake, pull yourself together," I imagine them snapping.  "Who gets upset by a fly in a spider's web?"