Adventures In Gardening, Scene 2: The June Bug Massacre

The pleasantly bald gentleman at Tallahassee Nurseries assured me that if I sprayed the $9 organic pest killer, whatever ravenous caterpillar currently devouring my rose, Nearly Wild, would be no more.  So, I purchased and dutifully sprayed.  I coated every remaining leaf, top and bottom.  I soused poor Nearly in "all-natural" poison.  And I waited.
        But when 10pm rolled around, and the croaking of toad and cricket filled the night with the crispy presence of insects, I began to doubt.  Would the killer spray really work?  What kind of demon bug leaves droppings like that, anyway?  I mean, allowing for the size ratio, we're talking the equivalent of poo produced by a herd of elephants after an orgy of sweet corn and circus peanuts.  What could possibly kill a creature of that caliber?
        I could imagine the caterpillar, creeping from its secret den, fat, bloated, but strong - belching colorful bubbles of organic bug killer before lighting back into my rosebush with renewed and now drunken abandon.
        Pippin and I exchanged glances.  She was lounging quietly on the Indonesian sofa, propped against a pillow, watching me.  I know what you're thinking, her eyes told me, and no, I wouldn't mind dipping outside for a bit.  So we went.
        Maglite in hand, I took the path down to the backyard.  Pippin raced past me into the darkness after some imaginary cat, armadillo...choose your mysterious night animal.  She pulled up just short of the overgrowth at the perimeter of the yard with a guttural warning to all beasts with trespass in their hearts.
       As I made my way to Nearly's spot, I swear I could hear a faint crunching - like the sound of a hundred tiny jaws, masticating.  The beam of light caught her branches, revealing odd movements and the dull reflection of many many...carapaces.
        They were covering the bush, clinging to every branch, chowing lazily at the buffet, not even bothering to bring their plates back to the table.  Junebugs.  Junebugs!  The gentle, dull-witted cattle of the insect world, harbingers of the Florida summer, patron beetles of my birth month.  Yes, you know the ones: they that fly stupidly into your temple and rebound, only to bump again, and again, and again.  How many had I carefully shooed out of harms way?  How many rescued from repeated and accidental attempted suicides-by-drowning in the rain bucket?  How many mourned, legs-up in the window-jam - sad victims of my imagined stupidity?  And all the time, wolves in sheep's clothing!  Junebugs gone wild!  Dancing, eating, jitterbugging, FORNICATING on my one and only rosebush!  They absolutely clung to each other, two-deep on a branch, high on organic poison and loving it.
       There was only one thing to do.  I put on my gardening gloves and I began to pick them off, one by one.  And, with a half-hearted little crunch, I squished each one of them.  Their round little bodies disappeared into the wet grass as I let them slip from my gloved fingers.  I imagined the bodies piling up beneath the blades of freshly-cut grass as I picked meticulously through Nearly's beleaguered branches.  Guilt sat in my gut like a pound of bacon grease.  I am massacring Junebugs.  I am wicked; I am cruel; I am a heartless human bent on the beautification of her own yard.... I am trying to save Nearly Wild, Vera's rosebush.  I kept crunching until her branches were bare and then I trudged back into the house.
 
       Pippin was already up on the porch, peering down beneath the lattice at my approach.  She had no interest in Junebugs and had long since left me to keep a lookout for cats from on high.  I climbed the porch stairs, holding the door open so she could slip between my ankles, into the hall.
        "Well," her trot seemed to say, "that was kind of exciting.  But, now...bed.  If you please."   She paused at the bottom of the bedroom stairs to catch my eye.  Humph! she said, tossing her head in the direction of my bedroom, waiting expectantly for my response.
        So, I guess life after committing mass murder in the defense of a leafy friend is pretty mundane.  I dutifully followed my dog up to bed and lay there for a while - but not too long - before falling asleep.  I went about my business the next day, too.  Fortunately for my deeply troubled conscience, the Junebugs returned en force for a second wave of buffet-style attacks, allowing me the experience of desensitization by sheer repetition.
        Today, I looked them up on a few gardening websites.  As it turns out, my belovedly bovine Junebugs are a pesky lot.  They start out as grubs, feeding upon the roots of my Saint Augustine grass.  This explains the sad, bilious color encompassing several patches of my lawn.  Then, they hatch and light unto the branches of trees and shrubs to feast.  Their generic Latin name, pyrgotidae, actually means "leaf eater".  Bastards.  Apparently, the innocent-looking little beetles love organic fertilizers, especially manure, and flock to any plant unlucky enough to receive such treatment in the summertime, when the bugs are active.  And, if, as Vera says, leaf-eating insects are drawn to plants in duress like flies to blood... poor Nearly.  She never had a chance.
        Unable to believe that the culprit was our own, home-grown Junebug and not some invading Japanese Beetle, Vera subjected me to a thorough interrogation on the size and appearance of the killers.   I could see why she didn't want to believe them guilty: everyone loves a Junebug.  But, though most of the corpses mysteriously disappeared by the morning after the massacre, I did manage to recover one, single, lifeless beetle.  True to scientific form, I compared my specimen to images of both Japanese invader, and Junebug.  I already new what I would find.  And there will be more where he came from.
        But I mean not to surrender.  These gorilla fighters will not overwhelm me with numbers.  I have organic poisons with which to inebriate them, and fingers with which to squash them.  And I intend to do it, one Junebug at a time.
 

Joining A Higher Order of Beings

I have a PhD.  It took seven years of post graduate study, added to the four years typical for college, not to mention the other thirteen years spent in Florida's public education system, to earn it.  Yet, to my mind, this does not win me a place among the Higher Order of Beings.  It took a flashlight, a coat hanger, and a rock to do that.

        Let me explain.  

        There are some things, I like to imagine, you just can't learn.  You can admire them, you can try to emulate the process by which they achieve success (and you might even win a time or two), but unless you have the Higher Order Gene you are basically just hurling empty pop cans across a river, in the dark.   

        I'm not talking about riding your little be-streamered, training-wheeled bicycle when you were four.   I'm not talking about building the Leggo Station from the directions when you were seven.  And I'm not talking about the Betty Crocker Cake Mix you made by adding water and pushing a button yesterday.

        I'm talking about shit MacGyver would do.

        For those of you who do not understand the awesomeness who is MacGyver, MacGyver was the most brilliant Action-Adventure show ever aired on American TV.  Between 1985 and 1992, Richard Dean Anderson (A.K.A. resourceful secret agent Angus MacGyver) amazed America's youth by defusing bombs with a Q-tip and a globule of spit, rigging booby-traps with sunglasses and a pair of underwear, or lighting a fire with a piece of wood, some teeth scrapings, and his own backside.  

        MacGyver went by his last name - because what genius wants to be called Angus?  And everywhere he went, he made useless trash into wicked tools.  He never lost his cool.  As the Jeep plunges into the icy river, trapping him inside, MacGyver just looks around, purposeful-like, for some cool shit to jimmy the locks, crash windows so as not to get cut by debris, or turn the Jeep into a submarine and motor on out of there. We foolish mortals might mistake such cool shit for simple lighters, paperclips, shoelaces, or McDonald's wrappers - but no.  To MacGyver, each piece of crap held within it the power to become something awesome.

        This is what spoke to me about MacGyver: He had imagination.  I had imagination.  Why not me?  Why might I not join the Higher Order of Beings represented by MacGyver?  After all, I had ridden the big-kid bike, without training wheels, when I was six - straining my naked little toes to reach, standing up because my feet wouldn't make it on the down-stroke if I sat.  This meant that I could make due with what I had, no matter the odds - or the chance of gravel-rich wipe-outs.  I had looked at the mound of tiny colored plastic in our Leggo box and seen houses, cars, boats, and weapons.  This meant that I could create cool new things out of inane junk.   I had wandered nearly lost and shoeless through the pine swamp and found my way back home in time for dinner.  This meant that I was naturally hardy and capable of surviving on my wits and keen sense of direction (I did try reading the moss on the bark, but the truth is, in Florida, moss grows ALL OVER the trees.  Still I had thought of it, and that had to count for something).

        I was exactly the child primed to imagine herself as MacGyver.

        The rest of my life has consisted of myriad futile attempts to live up to his legacy.  I think these efforts amuse my friends.  For example, I once removed the dragging plastic engine shield from underneath my friend Stephanie's Volkswagen Golf with a hatchet.  She and my other friend, Tara, save up odd tasks for me (challenges, if you will) to keep me occupied while they relax, entertained by my "imagination".  Sometimes, I'm sure, they could accomplish the feat just as well themselves, but they let me do it because they love me.  When Tara sprung her bike chain during the Ride for Hope, both she and her husband stood back with a grin: "Eh, Emily, you know how to fix that, right? You go ahead."  And I did.  For those two seconds, I was MacGyver.

       But today was different.  Today, I know in my soul that I have officially joined the Higher Order of Beings.  The MacGyver Order of Beings.  

       Here's how it all happened:  A few weeks ago, I'd done a lot of yard work.  I mowed the lawn, weeded the plant beds, trimmed, clipped, dug and planted.  In all this gardening hubbub, I somehow managed to leave the keys to my shed upon the ladder which rests on its side near the door.  Here's how that actually happened:  I was pushing the lawnmower up into the shed, as its floor is some foot and a half off the ground, and needed the free hand.  The keys had already tumbled out of my coverall pocket, and so - naturally - I set them nearby on the ladder.  

        Now, the shed door closes with a padlock - nothing fancy, no spring, not even a catch to keep the door closed.  Just the latch and the padlock.  So,  when I had wrestled said lawnmower into the shed - just before the rain, as it happens - I quickly secured the padlock and ran into the house to avoid the downpour.

        Several days later, I noticed that the shed keys were missing.  This is nothing unusual, however.  Thought I: They must be in the pockets of my coveralls; I'll check them when I do the laundry.  But they were not there.  Hm.  Well, thought I, they must be in the bucket I tossed my gardening business into that one time.  But they were not there.  Hm.  Good thing I don't need to get into the shed... I'm sure they're around here somewhere.

        But the whole time, I knew.  I knew their true resting place.  I recalled placing them onto the ladder; I recalled the hurry I had been in; and, sadly, I reflected that locking my keys in the car (about fifteen times, career) and the house (twice) was not something foreign to me.  

        The grass began to grow.  Longer and longer it creeped.  It began to seed.  I told myself: oh, but that's good!  I needed that grass to get a little thicker, a little healthier.  No need to REALLY search out those keys.  But really, I was avoiding the inevitable truth - a proof of personal stupidity that surely disqualified me from the Clan of MacGyver.  Badasses like MacGyver do NOT lock their shed keys in their own shed.  But eventually, I had to face it at last, and with a sigh, I grabbed my Maglite - awesome flashlight of MacGyver-types - and dragged my feet down to the backyard.   I had an idea.

        The shed door is slightly warped, making it easy to wedge your fingers in and have a peer within.  I aimed the beam of my flashlight inside and angled it toward the ladder.  A silver gleam.  A little flash of metal other than aluminum.  The keys.  Right where I had known them to be all along.  I sighed again.  Time to try idea number one.

       This involved a screw-driver and a wrench.  I reasoned that the cheap fools who actually built that shed (a plywood affair constructed under the stilts of my townhouse) probably used simple screws on the latch.  By unscrewing them, I could remove the lock apparatus itself and - Voila! -  I would be in.  But they were not as stupid as I supposed.  The screws were secured on the other side with bolts. Doh!  What to do now?

        Then, it happened.  A flash of brilliance.  MacGyver's own voice spoke to me.  Coat-hanger, he said, and a rock.  Keep your flashlight.

        I ran to the hall closet and grabbed a dry-cleaner-special, unwound it, and stretched it to its full length - keeping the hook at the end.  Then I dashed back down to the shed, where I found a large pebble.  Perfect, I thought, and wedged it into the doorjamb, giving myself a nice space through which to manipulate my new-fashioned stage-crook.  Holding the flashlight steady, I trained it on the keys (no easy feat with such a teeny crack to shine through) and inserted the crook.

        My initial hope was to snag the keyring right off the ladder and - Whohoo! - instant keys.  But maneuvering a crook, I soon discovered, is an underestimated skill.  I only managed to knock the keys to the floor and out of  reach.  But I wasn't daunted.  No.  MacGyver was with me now, and I was getting those keys.  I moved the rock wedge to the bottom of the door, nearer the floor, and tried again.  This time, after a couple of passes, the hook slipped into the keyring and I pulled.

        The sweet tinkling of key-on-key as they cleared the doorjamb and emerged, suspended from the coat-hanger like grapes on a vine, was my own personal Rocky anthem.  I had arrived at the top of the stairs, jersey trainers soaked in sweat, gasping with the glee of triumph.

        Well, I'll just mow the lawn whenever I want, I thought.  I grinned as I walked back up to the house, palming my keys.  My little dog, Pippin, stood in her usual spot on the front steps, searching under the house for cats.  She looked up at my approach, as if to say: "What are you so smug about?"

        "I'm a Higher Order of Being, little dog," I answered.  And at that moment, anyway, I was.

Adventures in Gardening, Scene 1: Nearly Wild

My Backyard is an eclectic collection of growing things.  I have a very hard time discriminating against any non-weed fauna applying for residency.  My friend, Vera, a Master Gardener, is always offering me new specimens.  "Oh, don't forget!  I saved that holly seedling for you!"
     Of course, what is clearly a lavishly tended and fully mature specimen in Vera's Babylonian garden looks like a sad little lump of pokey gizzard in mine.  But I have big dreams, and one day that little gizzard of a holly will grow from a pokey sapling into a.... well, anyway, that's another story.
    One gift from Vera's garden that is not a pathetically lesser version of its vibrant original is "Nearly".  Nearly is a rosebush.  Her full name is Nearly Wild - a perfectly suitable name for a rosebush in my possession, because a girl in pink has to hold her own in my backyard.  But Nearly is special.  Bequeathed to me (so Vera claimed) because there wasn't enough air in her current bed, she became my very first rosebush.
    I never planned to have a rose.  A pretty, pointless flower I always thought.  Untouchable, and yet so touchy.  Alluringly fragrant and beautiful, and yet so prone to.... well, mildew, fungus, and mold.
    But I accepted Nearly.  She promised to be low-maintenance, but more importantly, she represented a legacy.  You see, she had been Vera's first rose, too.  Now, she was mine.  And for the first time, I would plant something from Vera's garden into my own and it would be happier and healthier than before.
    At first, Nearly was in shock from the move.  But she recovered.  It made my heart smile to see the blooms bursting from her every branch.  I thought about Vera.  I hoped that Nearly's new happiness, her growth and her greenery, her velvety-pink petals falling around her like rain... I hoped she would bring some of that new life back into my friend.
    Vera has cancer.  Lymphoma.  It is aggressive and has spread quickly through her strong, little body.  It saps that strength.  Still, Vera goes on, moving through her garden, coaxing life to flourish.  I wanted to do that for her, too.
    But one steamy morning, as I went out to check on Nearly and the others in the backyard, something caught my attention.  Nearly's fresh new leaves were disappearing.  No, not disappearing... being devoured!  The culprit was nowhere in sight.  I searched her top to bottom - with gloves - and only scared-up a tiny, needly-looking excuse for a caterpillar who, if he WAS a guilty party, certainly wasn't the glutton who had left globulous black bug turds over ever remaining inch of Nearly's foliage.  Even I know that energy cannot be destroyed - only converted - and there was no way that little thing had converted all those leaves into all that poo without growing so much as a millimeter.
    The irony of the situation is hard to miss.  My flourishing rosebush, slowly and nightly ravaged by a mysterious killer, certainly sounds a literary note.  So, what is a young gardener's apprentice to do?  Much hangs in the balance.  Now is the time for action.  My feelings for my friend aside, I can't keep rinsing caterpillar poo off my rosebush until there's nothing left but stem.  And perhaps a butterfly.