Moths And Worms

I found a moth dead in the dishwasher while I was cleaning the kitchen. She wasn't the first dead moth I've found -- our house is full of them, especially come summer -- but she was the first dead moth I've ever found in the dishwasher. She was still clinging to a grate, looking chipped and mummified. I found a clean tissue and put her body outside with the trees and stars and wide night sky. I left her there to return to the gods of moths.

A second moth, apparently in protest of my kitchen-cleaning skills, flew into my face almost as soon as I closed the kitchen door.

I try to put little lives outside as often as I can. Ants, spiders (although there is a stubborn group of them that live by the kitchen sink and refuse extraction, probably because I watch early seasons of Supernatural while I clean and they're now hooked), mice, the occasional cool-looking beetle, and a whole lot of moths. Plenty of moths fly into the kitchen with the night and hang out till morning, when we put them outside or the kitchen spiders have breakfast. I don't begrudge the spiders -- they, too, need to eat -- but I try to get the moths out when I can.

Have you ever tried to catch a moth? They are quite good at evasive maneuvering and not easily swayed by pleas for leniency. Moth #2 and I faced off. I got a cup and a piece of paper. She readied her wings. The chase ended when she flew onto a cabinet and I was able to cup her on a solid, wide surface. I put her outside, checked that no other moths had come in, and went back to kitchen cleaning.

The kitchen spiders and I finished an old episode of Supernatural and retreated to our respective hideaways. I left mine later, though, since even I am compelled sometimes to step into the sunlight and do things outside the house. Nature greeted me with a moth who promptly flew down my shirt.

Whoop.

I put my bag down and snapped open the buttons on my shirt. The moth was perched on my bare skin just below my bra. She was snowy white, all white, except for two huge black eyes. Larger than the moths that usually come into our home, and soft. She made my fair skin look darker and my pink bra look pinker. She weighed barely nothing against my skin.

We looked at each other for a moment, and then she flew off.

You know, over the years I've lost track of how many times I've been lectured on empathy, sympathy, and humanity. How strong emotions and strong passions make us human. How struggling to identify these feelings, to understand them and to share them, makes you That Weirdo. All too often, the only people I see in movies, books and television who speak like they understand these struggles are the villains or the butts of jokes. I remember when I first started trying to share my experiences, to put them into words: the people I tried to talk to dismissed me completely. "Yeah, okay, Sherlock."

And I've found that all of these people have something in common: none of them rescue spiders. None of them save worms from the rain or step around saplings when they walk across the grass. None of them go back for snails or turtles on the road. They just don't do it. It doesn't seem to occur to them. These little lives just pass below their radar, sailing off unknown and uncared for into the distance.

The first convocation that I went to at Wellesley seated me behind a girl who crushed a beetle beneath her foot. I watched it die, legs twitching, shell split. She didn't look down at all.

I think about the worms in the rain a lot. They crawl onto the sidewalks and pathways and try their best not to drown, and people just crush them underfoot as they go. They also don't look down at all.

None of us are perfect, of course. But we are not Orpheus. The worms are not Eurydice. They can be taken to safer places for a second chance at life. And all these smooth-talkers and hypocrites have so much to say about themselves, but nothing to say about the moths and worms.