Lucy, Laura & Me

For me, wind, cayenne, cat poop and ecological sensitivity all combined serendipitously to produce great amusement for my family. If I hadn’t been in the process of passing my spleen through my sinus cavities, I’d have explained to the ingrates that it was all an attempt to guard their genes and preserve not only their own futures but that of generations to come.

They didn’t even say, “Bless you.”

A major bout of sneezing means, of course, that your nose runs and your eyes water. And that means, of course, that you wipe them. If a tissue or hanky is readily available, fine. If not, you just use your hands, right? Well, the second lesson of this morning taught me why mail carriers, college co-eds and other potential victims find pepper spray to be such an effective means of self defense. When cayenne pepper finds its way into your eyes, the result is enormous pain (think: licking a cheese grater then rinsing your mouth out with vinegar)—not to mention a long stream of unrepeatable utterances to a husband who is desperately trying to hold back the tears of laughter.

The Cayenne Pepper Episode occurred only a day and half after what is now known in our home as the Praying Mantis Incident. Responding to the advice of the same environmental gurus referred to in paragraph two, I purchased what I believed would be a pair of praying mantises to gleefully gobble all the aphids and other problematic insects in our garden. As it turns out, what I received, in a container that looked like a mini Baskin and Robbins ice cream carton, were two golf ball-sized egg sacs.

Apparently it would take two weeks for them to hatch and then they could be released into the garden. I moved the sacs to a clear Mason jar in the kitchen so my boys could watch and revel in the whole miraculous process of life. I’m an educational romantic, all right? The reality was that the jar became an unnoticed knick-knack within a day and a half.

Almost exactly two weeks later my husband asked, ‘Shouldn’t there be some sort of top on this jar in case those bugs get out?’ My glib, and slightly defensive, response? “Nah. We’ll notice when they hatch. And they can’t climb up the glass anyway.”

Famous last words. The very next afternoon, with two minutes and forty five seconds to get myself into the car to pick up carpool, I notice something all over the kitchen floor. Upon closer examination I realize that the praying mantis eggs have in fact hatched and there aren’t two as I had naively assumed, but more like two hundred. And F.Y.I, they can indeed climb out of a glass jar.

Now if this had been ants all over my kitchen floor I would’ve simply done whatever was necessary to mercilessly and expediently dispose of them. (Environment, my butt… get the RAID!) But I had paid actual money for these purposeful, living things, and somehow I was going to get them to their aphid-infested Promisedland…in two minutes and forty five seconds.

If you ever have the opportunity to gingerly sweep up two hundred praying mantises, I urge you to schedule more time than that.