On Bugs

Yesterday I said that no one likes bats. Today, I'll add that no one likes bugs. Even when we talk about bats and all their beneficial contributions that we humans should appreciate, these contributions usually begin and end with, "Well, they eat bugs. And nobody likes bugs."

A week or so ago, my classmate Kristin talked about Stink Bugs on her blog. I was surprised (and a little relieved in a weird sort of way) to know that I wasn't the only one in our class who 1) has been finding stink bugs in her home, or 2) is afraid to kill them because of their unfortunate name. Around the same time Kristin was writing this post, I discovered a stink bug lounging on my laptop when I came downstairs to work on schoolwork. My first line of defense, the indoor cat, was no help at all and just looked at the bug and started playing with my pencil sharpener. I ended up scooping up the bug on a piece of paper and running out to the driveway with it. There may have been some shrieking involved, but it's all a bit of a blur.

In general, I'm one of those weird people who doesn't like to kill anything, even stink bugs, without a really good reason for it. Am I going to eat the bug after I squish it? Good heavens, no. My usual M.O. involves scooping up and throwing out. The one time I ever played camp counselor, the girls in my cabin got a kick out of my extermination method for some cave crickets that had found their way onto one of the girls' beds. (Cover it with the trash can, slip paper between it and the bed, tape the paper to the trash can, run far from the cabin, and release. Process also involves shrieking.) Hey, the rest of the week was cricket-free so something went right.

On top of just not wanting to squish a bug, I also think said bug would have to be more useful outside of my house anyway. Out there are birds and plants (and bats!) who would benefit from an insect's presence in my yard. In the house, all we have are a couple of humans and the indoor cat, none of which need the bugs for our immediate survival. Share the wealth!

And so, I support insect repellents for inside your home. But not just any repellents. As I mentioned yesterday, bugs that have eaten insecticides are probably one of the major reasons for bat decline, and bees and birds aren't faring too well from it, either. There are little plug-in things for electrical outlets that send out a high-frequency wave thing that makes bugs just not want to come near. That's good repellent: no deaths or harmful chemicals involved.

Also, my mom has tried this herb cocktail that she says has helped keep the bugs out of the house. Once our herb garden begins to thrive this spring, I plan to take some cuttings and scatter them around my desk and see how I rate it. But if you want to try it yourself, this is what she uses:

• Pennyroyal
• Painted daisy (pyrethrum)
• Santolina
• Cedar
• Lavendar
• Peppermint
• Rue

All-natural ingredients, shouldn't hurt your housepets or kids, and smells a whole lot better than indoxacarb.

In short, I don't think it's asking too much to want the bugs to stay out of the house. I do think it's wise for bugs to be all over the place outside. But just in case they do get in, I don't want to kill them for the invasion. I just want them to think that, just maybe, it's a little more pleasant on the exterior side of the doorjamb.

The Indiana Bat

Nobody likes bats.

I say this, knowing perfectly well that one of my readers has a Bats from Europe and North America sitting on her shelf, but she and I notwithstanding, raise your hand if you can honestly say this is cute:


This particular bat is myotis sodalis: myotis meaning mouse ear, and sodalis meaning companion. Small and unassuming, eaters of destructive flying insects like alfalfa weevils and gypsy moths, the myotis sodalis, or Indiana Bat, is truly the ideal overhead nighttime companion. It’s endangered, probably due to habitat loss and insecticide, but in some areas, it still thrives.

Bats, like myself, are creatures of the night, and the sounds they make—high-pitched beeps and screeches to assist in echolocation—can only be heard by a select few, rendering them typically silent in human standards, easily forgotten, ultimately ignored.

The Indiana Bat is named for the state where it was first discovered and described, but a colony of them thrives near my home in Pennsylvania. They have found a hospitable spot in the kind of place that I, myself, have consistently found hospitable, especially when I’m far from my home: a church.


This little white church sits on the windy country road to Canoe Creek State Park, casts its shadow over a cemetery where lie several of my ancestors, and literally has bats in the belfry—thousands of them. Home to several thousands of Little Brown Bats, this church, which hasn’t held a human worship service in decades, also plays host to a few hundred Indiana Bats.

My mother used to take my brother and me to Canoe Creek to swim in the lake, and now that I’m older, I enjoy piloting a canoe around the surface of the lake or hiking through the woods along its edge. Its historic limestone kilns are worth a hike to see, and apparently the bats think so, too. Their population around the lake is divided between the church and the kilns.

I used to dislike, maybe even hate, bats, but I find myself feeling a kinship with myotis sodalis. In its displacement from the land it was named for, it still seeks companionship under the eaves of a church, just as I have each time I have found myself living in a new place. And even in the face of adversity, these bats congregate together near lakes and other bodies of water before setting out on their own.

They may be tiny and unassuming, but myotis sodalis carry a message of strength and hope on their little skinny wings.

Unrelated to the Topic at Hand

This is almost entirely unrelated to the topics of my backyard, nature, the environment, and writing (although, if I tried, I'm sure I could make a convincing connection), but as honorary aunt to this child, I feel it is my duty to post a photo of my best friend's adorable little boy, whom I got to meet this past Sunday.

He was a little sleepy that day, but clearly neither of us really minded.

Okay, that's all. Thanks for indulging Tante Becca's need to show off her Neffe. (-:

A Brief Episode of the Afternoon

Huge and sporadic snowflakes speckle the air like static on a soon-outdated analog TV channel. Beyond the static, the twigs and branches from a fallen tree lay scattered on the frozen ground, the casualties on the losing side of last week's battle with the wind. The mockingbird sits still in a bare bush, watching me warily, holding its song until I pass.

Today, the only birds that fly away at my arrival are the doves. Of the several dead tree trunks behind the garden shed which we've left standing for woodpeckers over the past few years, only one has succumbed to the storm. As I pick my way over it, the tree beside me begins to rattle. Am I hearing an echo of the man across the street hammering shingles back onto his children's playhouse? I look up, and a small woodpecker is no more than a meter overhead, finding its lunch under the bark of a tree.

I circle the garden shed and come out by the dormant grapevines. Another several doves rise from the ground, flapping and cooing as they escape a perceived threat (me). But for them, all the birds in the yard seem to have accepted me. It's a nice feeling, to be one of the gang in your own backyard.

I don't expect to ever experience a Snow White-like oneness with nature, with the mockingbird alighting on my head while doves and blue jays feed out of my hand, the red squirrel nibbling on acorns at my feet. What's more, I don't want that. I am a natural predator to these creatures, and I hope that they remain conscious of the fact, just as I am conscious of danger around the natural predators of humans.

More doves explode from the vegetable garden as I pass, and I smile at their wisdom as I rub my frozen hands together and reenter the warmth of the house.

:32°F:
:partly sunny, light flurries:

A Response to Science

Last week, my friend was on her lunch break in a high-rise office building in downtown Philadelphia. From her cubicle, she emailed me this article by Wray Herbert from Newsweek.com. Today, while wrapped in a blanket at my computer, I read two blogs from my classmates: The Turning of Self from Mark Anthony, and A Cold S(easonally) A(ffected) D(isordered) Place from Kristin. All three of these online nuggets got me thinking about science.

John "beauty is truth, truth beauty" Keats probably rolls in his grave each time something is proven true by science. But in the case of the Newsweek article above, it seems that science is proving the truth of beauty, at least as far as natural beauty is concerned. Imagine! A study has proven that overworked and stressed-out jobbers out there in Officeland are calmed and reenergized by a walk in the park.

In Kristin's blog, she writes about the effect a dark, cold winter can have on our emotions. She asks, "Do people who live in a wooded area have lower blood pressure?" And Mark Anthony, while walking off a bit of melancholy, reflects, "Interesting how much control our moods can have over what we see and take notice of." Do our moods control what we see, or does what we see control our moods?

It seems, according to the scientists featured in the Newsweek article, that it might be a little bit of both. Stressed-out workers seemed to calm down with the very image of a natural setting before them. But after a three-mile walk, with time enough to reflect on their surroundings, get their brains to calm down after some busy deskwork, their entire bodies began to calm down. And it wasn't just the exercise, as the control group proves. "Interacting with nature shifts the mind to a more relaxed and passive mode, allowing the more analytical powers to restore themselves," says Herbert.

That's why I'm so thankful for the weekly assignment this semester to spend time outside, no matter the weather. I find that I stroll my backyard and visit local parks more often than I would have otherwise, even when I'm not working on an assignment. When we take our natural, animal selves outside, it's a brief reminder of what we are at the very bottom of things. We are not spreadsheets and editor's marks and state educational standards; we are flesh and bone, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, hearing, seeing, smelling, and feeling. And maybe that added perspective is what really brings us back down to earth.

An Affair to Remember

When I was twenty years old, I had an affair with Marburg.

In a way, it would be great, truly great, if Marburg were actually a man, but Marburg is the town I studied in when I was in Germany my junior year of college. I had no real affairs that year (or any year, actually), but the footprints I left on that town’s cobblestone streets correspond to the footprints the town left on my entire being.

Marburg was mysterious and foreign, and don’t women stereotypically fall for the “strong silent types”? Marburg was strong: the town remained virtually unmolested through two world wars and a few centuries of architectural revolutions because of its silence. It was love at first sight. I wanted to learn every street, every alley, every staircase and passage that I could tread on my daily rambles.

I wandered regularly. I made a habit of it. The town’s pedestrian-friendly setup encouraged me to head out without a destination in mind, or if I had a destination, to find the most circuitous route there. Wandering slowly through the veins and arteries infusing the medieval town, I truly saw where I was. Discovering a fountain behind a forgotten cemetery was like discovering a freckle on your lover’s toe: a delightful surprise that just added to the elements that made the town unique and lovable.

Too many times, now that I’m back in the States, I realize I don’t truly know where I live. Just beyond my backyard, the road I drive every day to get into town is almost completely unfamiliar. I have never walked it slowly, watching for the wildflowers growing from the roadside gravel, noticing the flowerpots sitting above my neighbor’s kitchen door, or delighting in the way the road dips and curves with the valley floor.

Marburg was a temporary affair, as I knew all along. When the summer semester ended, I returned to Pennsylvania, leaving behind the body and soul of a town I knew almost as well as my own. When I consider my future, I wonder if I’ll ever return as a permanent resident to that town, or whether I should establish it in my heart as a deep and abiding fling that can sadly never be repeated.

I believe that, no matter where it ends up being, I’ll know I’ve found home when I can feel the same intimate connection with a place as I had with Marburg. And that one will be an affair to remember.

Ja, Es ist doch windig.

I brought this up in our class discussion today, but it's such a potent part of the day that I feel compelled to post it on my blog, as well. The wind has been hurling through my region today like a freight train, and it's causing about equal destruction.

On Christmas Eve, after my dad's sudden heart attack and our subsequent phone calls to 911, the coroner, and the funeral director, my family went to bed and was surrounded by the same thundering wind that we've been getting today. That night, it ripped apart a trash bag at the end of our driveway and scattered all sorts of junk all over our neighborhood, which I spent Christmas morning walking up and down the hills to gather anew.

Today, the wind is ripping shingles off the roof of our garage, ripping open birdfeeders, sending bird nests from the trees reeling onto our deck, and making my indoor cat even crazier than she already is. (Every time a leaf blows past the window, she hurls herself at the window as though she can catch it. Poor thing; it's a wonder her nose isn't permanently flattened.)

I love wind, as a rule. I'm fascinated by a force made visible only by what it's affecting, made audible only by loose ends. But today, I wish it would be a little softer to me and my family. Dear wind, please try to at least leave half the shingles on our roof. And make sure to spin the windmills on your way down the valley. Thanks.

One Small Step

On Saturday afternoon, my mom and I took a fine and fancy ramble through the yard, bouncing ideas off one another for extending the prettyish sort of little wilderness behind the garden shed, and observing which creatures of the wild have been meeting up on our property. In ankle-deep snow, we discovered, much to our delight, deer tracks! It looked as though a small family had come through, blending in their trails with those of the rabbits, the juncos, and the wookiee.

That night, I wrapped myself in the red and black checkered jacket that hangs by the back door and walked the driveway, examining the shadows of the trees, which lay on the white snow: silent, bold, black lines cast by the bright silver moon.

I woke up Sunday morning to a brown world. As we adjusted our choir robes before the service, we all asked each other what happened to the snow. Several inches had disappeared overnight. I was glad I had taken the time to go explore the trees' shadows against the white canvas of our yard the night before. It's possible that winter has left us until December.

Of course, it's possible that this is a deceptive thaw. In any case, the slight rise in temperature yesterday encouraged me to spend as much of daylight as I could outside. The ankle-deep snow had become ankle-deep mud, the area around the compost bin soggiest of all.

And then last night, I braved whatever wilderness comes out after sundown, and I took a brief, but beautiful stroll around the back of the garden shed, between the vegetable garden and the grapevine, around the deck, and back to the backdoor.

If the neighbors aren't already talking, they will be now. "Well, her mother says she's living at home while she's in grad school," they're saying to one another, "but have you seen the way she wanders the yard at all hours? I think grad school's their little language for something else."

I don't care. The night was too inviting. The moon lit my way better than any flashlight. The mud squashed gratifyingly into the tread of my boots. The weather is still cool enough to keep most animals in hibernation, but a close call with a skunk last summer kept my senses sharpened nevertheless. The rustle of leaves around the strawberry plants encouraged me to hurry a little faster toward the house. Before I began shivering inside my grandpa's old hunting jacket, I stood on the deck, just me and the moonlight, staring into the sky.

:clear night skies:
:31° F:

Steal This, Identity Thieves!

Now this is what I'm talking about.

"Is it?" you're all asking. "I thought you were talking about your backyard. Is this guy writing about your backyard?"

Okay, no, not directly. But he is talking about some very simple ways that everyone can contribute to the beneficial, cyclical nature of ... nature.

It's my friend Emmett Duffy at thenaturalpatriot.org again, and by "friend" I mean "someone whose blog I've read but who doesn't know I exist." Oh, the slipperiness of language! Whatever his relationship to myself, however, Emmett and I both recently thinned out our files and fed the private logs of our lives into a paper shredder. Files downsized. Identities saved. And there was much rejoicing.

Back story! In ye olde days of yore when I worked a temp job at Johns Hopkins University, one of my tasks was to collect the sensitive documents that my higher-ups wanted to trash. I would then take the collected stack of papers downstairs and feed them through a gianormous (no, really, it was) paper shredder, feeling for all the world like Pam Beesley (albeit maybe not quite as beautiful, and tragically without my own Jim Halpert) and simultaneously wondering, "Where does all this shredded paper go?"

One day my question was answered when I saw bags of it heaped onto other bags of trash, all heading toward the same free-for-all dumpster outside.

Flashforward to last week when I cleaned out my filing box. I still haven't emptied the trash can attached to my shredder, because I'm not too sure where to put the confetti that was once my personal documents. I don't want to waste it the way they did at Hopkins, but if I do, I at least have the excuse (as they didn't) that my township doesn't encourage a division of garbage. We have a compost bin in the vegetable garden, but the last time we tried to put any kitchen goodies inside, we discovered the top had frozen shut. (Yesterday's high was 19°.)

But seeing Emmett's success with chilly backyard composting gives me just the incentive I need to hold onto the bin of confetti and wait for a thaw. After all, when bugs and worms have eaten the paper and turned it back into the dirt our plants just love, it will be impossible to trace it all back to me! And that's just the way nature intended.

Sign of Spring

I couldn't wait to leave my hometown until I came back after my first year of college. It was leaving and returning that gave this place roots in my heart. But despite those roots, I still don't think of this area as also being the stem, leaves, and flower. I still don't really know where "home" is for me at this point in my life story, or even at which part of the plant (to stick with the previous metaphor) I am just now.

If home is where you keep your stuff, then this is definitely home. And if home is where you spent your childhood, I’m in the right place. The garden swing by the back fence hangs from the same metal frame that we once called the swing set, but the sliding board and gymnastic rings are long since gone. So is the sandbox, which was overgrown years ago by the tenacious trumpet vine planted by previous owners. I wonder how many little green army men are still buried in that dirt, forever entwined in the roots of the trumpet vine.

Those memories of childhood are asleep now, cuddled under a thick blanket of snow, and I’m glad. In a few months, the snow will melt and water the ground, go up into the roots and trunks and stems of the plants and burst open the buds on the trees and flowers. The grass, crushed by the snow and ice all winter, will suddenly spring up, bright green, vibrant, and ready to be mown.

I dread the spring.

In the past month or so, I’ve sort of gotten used to my dad being gone. His absence from the house is still felt, but it’s getting more normal each day. Each morning, we wake up to a clear driveway thanks to the kindness of neighbors and their snowblowers. We get fewer phone calls for his business on our answering machine each day as more and more clients realize the truth. Not having Dad in the wintertime is starting to be emotionally acceptable.

But when the snow is gone and our wonderful neighbors begin mowing the lawn instead of plowing the snow, when I can sit on the garden swing and look over the verdant lawn toward the sprouts in the vegetable garden, when my mom and I have to waterproof the wooden garden fence and deck that my dad built so many years ago when we first moved in ... when we decide where we want to scatter his ashes ... I wonder if grief will be as compatible with that season as it is with this.

Yet even as I sit on the garden swing, now in shadow from the sun which has just dipped beyond the mountain behind me, I gaze east over our yard, past the vegetable garden, over the neighbor’s yard and over the next valley. My neighborhood is in a brown shadow now, but a thin band of yellow and pink trees glows on the next hill. Beyond them, black tree trunks blend with the white snow to make a crest of gray, and beyond that, an azure mountain, reflecting the full glories of a setting sun I can no longer see.

In this terrain that feeds the roots of my life story, I am given hope. The sun may have set for now on my yard, but it still shines brightly on a distant mountain.