Worms for Supper

I came home to an eighty-five degree house and a stinky trashcan. We had just returned from our adventures in alligator territory. My boy had spent the last twenty-four hours making more than twenty-four paper airplanes—much more, actually. So many that Grandma’s house may now be called The Land of the Airplanes. (We are big on titles.)

We returned home to find that we have now entered that awkward time between late spring and summer, where it is actually quite warm, but we refuse to turn on the air conditioning so early in the year. Sweating inside my house makes me irritable. The heat starts to have an effect on all of us, as explained as follows:

I was standing at the kitchen sink, washing the collard greens I had just picked in the garden, when I made a troubling discovery...the caterpillar. A green little caterpillar/worm creature was cocooning there. I don’t actually mind any insect, unless it has a squishy body and is tiny and can slip unseen into food that will go into my mouth. Shutter. I decided to dispose of the entire leaf—it was too tainted. Rationality deteriorates under these sweaty conditions.

The Beast

“I want nana,” said the toddler.

“Yeah, okay—here,” I said in distraction, pushing a banana her way. Then something even more disturbing happened. I looked through the pile of collards I had picked, and every leaf was tainted by the presence of a caterpillar in a translucent cocoon. It was an infestation. The creatures were undergoing metamorphosis on my dinner, and I was too disgusted to stop it. I stood there, my face wrinkled in repulsion as I imagined accidentally overlooking one of the little beasts.

“My nana! It fall over! Tape it!”

I looked down at an equally perturbed toddler. A perfectionist by nature, she cannot endure bananas that fail to meet her expectations. The banana had somehow broken in half. She sat there, her face also wrinkled in repulsion as she imagined having to eat an imperfect banana.

“Calm down, we cannot tape a banana.” Can’t you see there are more important things at stake here? There are caterpillars in the kitchen!

“Mom!” The four year old calls from the living room, “Most elephants have uncles. And aunts. And cousins, too.” I recognized that passage. He had suddenly decided to read Dr. Suess’s riddle book, only instead of reading the questions, he was reading the answers.

“Okay, that’s good.” What should I do? Do I scrap all the collards? No, I can’t do that. But I don’t want the little creatures to keel over either.

“Nana! Nana fall over! Nana fall over!” Toddler is still standing her broken half of the banana onto its match, and watching it collapse.

“Eat half of it and it won’t be able to fall anymore,” I said swiftly.

“Dr. Robert Bernstein, the freckle specialist, says ‘Don’t worry. You can’t catch them’,” calls out the boy in a sing-song voice.

Should I just strip off the piece of the leaves that the worms are on and tell myself that there is no chance I have missed one?

“All Japanese are Japanese the minute they are born!”

“That’s nice, sweetheart," I muttered.

“Nana! Nana fall down!”

“Good god, what is wrong with us? Just eat the banana!” I said, and then had a moment of clarity as I looked down at the collards. Just eat the collards.

And so little strips of greens with cocoons were carefully ripped off, put back in the yard, and we had a lovely dinner. The toddler forgot about the banana and I fed it to the chickens. The boy abandoned the answers in the book to catch some grasshoppers.

Maybe I will invest in some fans to cool off the heat and the drama.