Last week, during a chat with the landscaping crew working on my yard, a rednecky kid declared that he killed three snakes as they were clearing the kudzu. It was clearly a big deal, and he was very excited, in that low key way which emphasizes the gravity of both being confronted by, and then killing, snakes. Then yesterday as I raked some ancient magnolia leaves from the long neglected front yard, a little boy wandered up and began talking as he tried to kill every bug that had the misfortune of crawling into his peripheral vision. When I warned him about snakes though, he became a little less aggressive, and a little more concerned.

All of this has made me reflect back on childhood and the enormously fulfilling pastime of indiscriminate bug slaughter. My own tales involved the endless cutting of worms (will they grow back?), the squashing of june bugs, roaches, the hosing of bee hives and the demolition of ant hills. My sister used to pull the glo-sacks off of lightening bugs and stick them on her fingers for an ominous visual effect. But the most fun were the projectile decapitations of caterpillars. In the summer time, on Long Island, our cul-de-sac would become infested with little caterpillars that ate the leaves off of trees. There were lots of them and they would end up everywhere, so that you couldn’t avoid squashing a few just by walking. Of course this provided us with endless hours of twilight fun: choosing and stalking a caterpillar before the kill (not very difficult), positioning one’s sneaker over the little furry body just right (this took practice), then lowering the foot, quickly, heel to toe, shifting your full weight up on the tip of toe, so that the green guts of the caterpillar launched out of it’s head for the dramatic awe-inspiring finale.

And why not? Little bugs are the arch-nemeses of little kids, infecting them, biting them and constantly taunting them as if to say, “hey, you’re small too!”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 at 2:09 pm and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.