The Annual Wildlife Post—Why Bugs Freak Us Out

At dusk the drone of the cicadas is deafening. For a species that theoretically only spawns every three to five years, this annual event puzzles Chicagoans. We're confused because we hide from the elements most of the year so any summertime visual/auditory arousal throws us off.

My 8-year old grandson takes the cicada fertility boon as an opportunity to collect molted shells, the exoskeletons. He’s delighted with this process. To add to the wonderment of it all, his aunt bought him a plastic bug farm for live insects. I told her that one day, when she has grandchildren, I'll try to return the favor.



But even an 8-year old can’t take the sight of maggots eating through the head of a dead bird. Master Scientist comes running to inform me, after my Saturday nap:

"Bubbie, you’re not going to believe this! On the deck, in a flower pot, is a dead bird! A very large, dead, black bird! And his head is only a skeleton! The worms are eating him. You have to see this!"

I’m sick at the thought, pass on the demonstration, and he totally understands. The culprit is West Nile Virus, or bird flu, some such plague. Black crows are dropping from the sky. You see them in the parks, quite dead, if you look carefully. This is an opportunity for my daughter, a good Jewish mother, to teach her son, “Now you have to be SURE to wash your hands when you touch bugs. You could catch the sickness, too.”

This is probably where it begins, I'm thinking, the female aversion to bugs, for it does seem to be associated with women, the EEEK, thing. Generations of prejudice against things that crawl, for no one likes anything crawling on the skin, and the fear of disease. Perhaps there is also a fear of the unknown, a fear of invasion. They are small. They're fast. They hide. Who can keep up with them?

But honest. They’re so small, bugs. We can kill them fairly easily. Seven in one blow, if necessary. And RAID is amazing, has subdued many a crawling or flying six-legged monster.

A person can't let them get the psychological upper hand. You just can't. Even in quantity, they're still just bugs. I can say this because aside from a few spiders and a few ants, resident centipedes and water bugs, my house is bug free. If there were other, strange, territorial, hard-to-kill bugs, I'd probably move.

We're supposed to be tolerant, I guess, and loving. But last week we were playing a little tennis near a city garden and a bee stung my hand as I reached for a lost ball. It was a little bee, an aggressive bugger, and I got angry because I had been trying to teach the kids what I learned from the book, The Secret Life of Bees (fabulous, Sue Monk Kidd, that if you love them, bees, they won’t hurt you. Send them love.

Rubbish. Do not believe this.

Once I had a friend who told me a bug story. Her mother ridiculed her for being afraid of bugs, and she didn't even have a fear of bugs, not in the plural. It was one particular bug that threw her off her game, a big indestructible thing.

None of us like the indestructible ones.

I have a fond memory of waking up to the sound of a mosquito buzzing in my ear, me trying to rouse my parents from their sleep. My mother groggily inspires me, "You can do this, I know you can. Turn on the light, track him down, and kill him." She didn't like mice, particularly, but there wasn't a bug she couldn't dispose of with alacrity. Once I mastered mosquito detection, it was a short step to swatting and murdering the bloody things.

So why the bug phobia, you asked, didn't you? I think that the EEEK! thing is a combination of what we've already said, they're small, they could go anywhere, but we should add the functionality of the behavior, see it, sometimes, as a coy female reaction that begs male attention. Bring out the club, caveman. We have roaches.

This vulnerability is modeled by a woman's mother, a woman who assigned the job, killing house bugs, to a man. Not all that different than Do the lawn, dear, it's grown to my knees. It is endearing when they come to the rescue, and gives the fellow something easy to do, something less taxing than the lawn. Some swat with a bare hand.

My daughter didn't see a bug-killing role division, for if you remember, bugs didn't blow my own mother away. So theoretically, knowing how transgenerational these things can be, my daughter shouldn't have shrieked this morning when she opened her laptop to find an ant. She shrieked once, then she shrieked again when she saw another. I brought out the RAID, but she blamed herself for letting the kids eat terrible sticky things while playing Club Penguin (the Facebook entry drug).

The shriek, we concurred, was associated with the thought of insects devouring the inside of her Mac. A fairly good reason to fear them.

Now, if I hear a drone from inside that thing at dusk? Something's going to have to give.


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Women in Pink

This is the year of the cicada in Illinois. They're here en masse every 17 years, a noisy lot, much like crickets.

The local news people show us how to fry them up as appetizers and marinade them as side dishes, but it's not something we would actually do. Even though they're supposedly here every 17 years, I see a few annually and send them to my grandsons via USPS. That makes them 41 cent cicadas.

Today was HOT and there wasn't a cicada in sight. But we looked, took a little walk in the neighborhood. We were working off lunch, stopping to admire the weird things people leave on their front lawns, and admiring flowers. Chicagoans put a lot of effort into beautifying their yards.

That's why Chicago is called the garden city.

I let FD do the beautification thing and mainly concentrate on the task of removing tricycles and Razors (scooters), courtesy of the neighborhood kids, from our sidewalk. I'm assuming that when somebody trips and breaks a hip in front of my house on one of these things that it will be me that the personal injury lawyers will hunt down.

Lady, is this your scooter?

No.

Prove it.

It's not, honest.

Then why was it in front of your house. I have a client in traction and it's your fault.

Sorry.

Anyway, we were walking the neighborhood and we looked up and there they were! No, not the cicadas, the women in pink!You can't actually register here. I copied the picture from the official Avon Walk for Breast Cancer website. If you're not already aware, Avon holds the weekend fund raiser in various cities across the nation at different times of the year.

Every June Chicago Avon walkers limp through our neighborhood on Saturday in cute pink tee-shirts (sleeveless this year), jogger shorts, and cool pink or green baseball caps.

FD and I never miss them. He's a little embarrassed to be staring, but they're impossible to miss. Last year, or maybe it was the year before that, I think we caught up with them on a walk in Skokie. We're in awe, of course that people are dedicated to a cause and actually go out and do something for it.

It's always hot as blazes in the summer and our walkers gather in groups of 2-5, looking tired and dehydrated, but happy.

I said to FD, I should blog about this.

Go talk to them!

No, what would I say?

I don't know. You talk to people every day! Go talk to them.

Okay. But you have to wait for me. Don't walk ahead. Wait for me.

Okay.

What will I say?

I don't know. But you're already wearing a pink shirt. You'll fit right in!

Right.

I was wearing a pink blouse so I approached two attractive women and asked if I could walk with them, ask them some questions. "I'd like to put this in my blog," I said.

Sure! (huff puff)

You two are amazing! How far have you walked?

26.2 miles today, 13.1 tomorrow. We're almost finished for today. Only another half mile to go.

What? Did you say 26.2 miles and what? Why the weird numbers?

There are 26.2 miles in a marathon, so we did that today. And 13.1 in the half marathon we do tomorrow.

Wow! That's a lot of walking! Why are you two personally doing this? Uh, I mean, why do you think most of the women are here, I mean, uh. . .

Now I'm freaked. So insensitive! For all I know, one of these women has just lost someone she loves to breast cancer and I'm asking her to tell me about it?! I'm beginning to feel nauseated.

Well, my mother had breast cancer (OH NO! I was right!)

Did she survive, I hope?

Oh yes, she's doing just fine!

(Phew) Thank G-d. So is that the case with most of these women? Do you think most of the women who volunteer for the walk are related to or know someone who's had breast cancer?

For sure. Who doesn't know someone who's had breast cancer?

Right. Of course! That's true, isn't it? Listen, thanks so much. I've got to go. Tell me your names!

I'm Anne and she's Kim. (Or was it, I'm Kim and she's Anne).

Thanks so much. You're wonderful. Google the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer-Blogs tomorrow and you'll see your names in my blog.

Great.

Okay, bye now. Good luck.

I spotted FD and crossed the street to meet him.

That went well, I said. (I told over my two minute conversation). He asked why I ended the interview so quickly. I told him that I'm not a journalist and it felt very much like I was invading their privacy to meet my own selfish ends and that my line of questioning could have gone badly.

He totally understood.

He told me that 1 in 11 women are diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetimes. We went over the names of people we knew personally. Some survivors, some not, some surviving.

So I thought that you should know:

The Avon Foundation is busy supporting:

breast cancer education and awareness
screening and diagnosis
access to treatment
support services
and scientific research into the possible cause, prevention, treatment and cure.

The walk that takes place in different cities from coast-to-coast raised more than $100 million between 2003-2005.

Sounds like a very good cause to me.

LaBriyut walkers!

(rhymes with La-Tree-Loot)

or To Your Health,

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