Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

I don’t know when it is officially ladybug season, but I am reasonably sure it is not January 2nd in my part of the northern hemisphere, where I awoke this morning to a crystalline white blanket of sheer ice atop cars, sidewalks, lawns, dormant flower beds, even hibernating Weber grills. It’s winter. Nothing’s newly blooming outside, and I have no indoor plants right now, so all’s quiet on the insect front.

As I was at the computer this morning, I saw movement near my pen and pencil holder. I’m not a big fan of things that move indoors; usually this would mean spiders. Even though humans are 69 times larger than the average house spider (I just did the math – assuming the average spider is one inch long – additional fun fact for your next dinner party: the ratio of size between humans and ants is 138:1), my involuntary reaction – usually a combination of cringing, pulling back, and occasionally shrieking – is justified: I’m smaller than the average 5’9” human those numbers are based on. I’m probably only 64 times bigger than the critters that crawl on my walls and ceilings, and a mere 32 times larger than the big 2-inchers that take up residence here. Creepy, crawly critters are more of a real threat to me than they are to my 6-foot tall husband.

Anyway, in preparing for a spider spotting, I flew myself and my desk chair back from the desk, took my alarm position, and investigated. It was moving quickly. It was crawling up the side of an underused, thick graphite drawing pencil that has stuck up from a handful of writing implements for years. It was small, round, red and the absolute opposite of a spider. A ladybug. I could almost hear my internal narrator intone, “Awwwwwwww.” And just like that I shot back to the desk, grabbed the pencil, and ran out to the living room to show my son.

“Look what’s on my pen!” I exclaimed.

“That’s a pencil,” he deadpanned. I had interrupted his reading of the latest, favorite Rick Riordan series, and he does not suffer these interruptions happily.

“Whatever,” I replied, as if I can say things teenagers say and no one will notice.

“Look! It’s a ladybug! In Winter! On my pencil!”

I was so excited I could only speak in exclamations.

“Quick! Grab your camera! Your phone! Whatever! Can you get a picture? Hurry!”

This thing was moving quickly though, and I had to turn and turn the pencil to keep it from crawling off.

He got the picture.

The Unexpected Visitor

Without thinking, I took it outside and tapped the pencil against the stoop to the front door. Today I’d be the kind of human that doesn’t kill spiders or other unwanted creatures who come indoors only because we’ve deforested every inch of the planet and they have nowhere else to go. No, today I’d carry the little thing outside and give it another chance to live fully. Besides, who can kill a ladybug? That’s like smothering Bambi, or sitting dry-eyed through ET’s final journey home.

Only afterwards did I realize that perhaps taking the ladybug outside was not a particularly good option. It was frozen solid outdoors, and the thing had apparently come in (awoken?) for the express reason that it WAS freezing outside.

Oops. Just about every action I had taken, based more on impulse and instinct than usual, was slightly off. I was really excited to see a ladybug. Especially after thinking it was a spider. My thoughts for much of the day were influenced by seeing that creature. Are there others waiting to crawl up my pencil cup? What else is lurking beneath my desk, in the walls, just waiting for the right moment to emerge, in search of, what? A better life with more freedom and easier access to food? The insect equivalent of the American Dream? When was the last time I drew?

I’m going to remain hopeful that the ladybug survived. There are plenty of ways for it to get back into the house, which was built in the 1940’s and therefore has hosted decades of things that crawl, fly, even scamper through walls. It got in all by itself the first time. I’ll be on the lookout. Maybe I’ll even buy an indoor plant later today, so that if I see it, I’ve got a new place for it to call home.