False Alarms
You don’t know it yet, but this is a clever title. It’s a writerly title. I’ve chosen “writerly” over “clickbait.” THIS IS A TITLE FOR ME.
A Note for You If You’re Having A Bad Day
Dear One,
There is a certain way that men my age garden. I’m not sure that this is a universal rule, but I’ve noticed it in, like, seven men. And since I tend to exaggerate numbers (and know very few actual men, if we’re being honest), you should know that that number is factually four.
The way this type of man gardens is meticulously. He plants things you can eat, and beautiful flowers you can cut and put in vases. He gets the right soil, he knows about weeds, he laments about rabbits and he builds little wire tents to go around the plants so the rabbits won’t get the things the rabbits want. I’m sure this isn’t gender-specific — indeed, I’ve known tons of women who also plant stuff like it’s an Olympic sport, and bring over fat carrots and hole-free chard (how?!) and even strawberries. I know I’m writing this like I have judgement towards these people, or like there’s something somehow wrong with being good at gardening, but I swear, that’s not my point at all. It’s just that good at gardening isn’t a thing I think I’ll ever be.
I wish I was better at gardening, but I’m not, and I have to talk to the Garden Flex men sometimes. What do I say to them? It’s a thing I happenstanced upon, and not a thing for which I can really take credit.
There was place in our yard that needed serious TLC following a few foolhearty years I spent letting our chickens free range (read: eat and kill everything), and a catalogue convinced me to sow some native plant seeds. The birds ate 50 percent of the seeds, and the other 50 percent grew modestly, and turned over lovely yellow flowers.
Now, the native plants blogs swore that the plants — which, remember, came from meager little seeds — would come back stronger year after year, but this seemed actually impossible. I laughed at the promise of stronger flowers that had grown from seeds, and moved on.
Yet come back stronger they did. It was like watching a delightfully garish sequel. I didn’t do anything: beginning in February, they started bubbling up, and now it’s July, and they’re taller than the tall fence, and it looks sort of like, in this one area, I am good at gardening. Which I am not. So the thing I say to the men is this: “Oh, you know, I intentionally decided to go with native plants, because it’s so good for the earth and the ecosystem and whatnot. And I can tell that the soil loves them, because they’ve come back even heartier this year. Zone zone, tendril tendril, pollinator, etcetera.” And the men nod. I hope they are thinking, “Wow. She’s so eco-friendly and green-thumbed.” In fact, I’ve just gotten lucky.
This is all preamble. You have to know about these tall native plants growing in my back yard so I can tell you about the insects on them.
Three days ago, I noticed a lot of insects on them.
The insects were watermelon-colored, and there were 495, roughly. The insects wallpapered the stems of a cluster of false sunflowers. Clearly, the insects were family members, and they loved their home; they jauntily waggled back and forth and seemed fully carefree. On top of one of the false sunflowers, I saw a larger insect that I assumed was a parent to all the happy babies below, and he or she was big enough that I could use the Seek app on my phone to identify him or her.
Let’s pause to talk about my mood here. What would YOUR mood have been? Take a moment to decide, and then I’ll tell you about mine. My mood was panic. It was near hysteria. I’m not scared of insects, and I’d seen this kind of insect before, on canoe trips in marshes, but one thing I know as an occasional gardener is that insects are generally bad. The insect will eat the tomato. The insect will eat the kale. Insecticide exists to kill the insects who want to eat your whole garden and then cackle about it. Eric Carle wrote a deceptively jolly book about this horrifying reality that quakes the boots of anyone who has ever purchased blood meal.
I took a deep breath, thinking about how the back of my brain knew that some insects were, somehow, good. There are seed packets you can plant to attract insects. Why would you plant those if you didn’t want to have insects around? Surely there aren’t seed packets just for masochistic people who want to suffer. And if there are, they’d call them Suffer Seeds, because that’s an alliteration. Yes, there are insects that are pollinators. And some insects are good insects that kill the bad insects. I imagined a chess board of insects, and Googled “false milkweed bug,” which, Seek told me, my false sunflower had in abundance. (A lot of false wildlife in my yard, it’s true.)
The search results confused me. The first hit was someone who had found a false milkweed bug, and wasn’t that interesting. “I guess it’s interesting,” I thought, “But it doesn’t tell me whether false milkweed bugs are good or bad.” I adjusted my search. “False milkweed bug good or bad for garden.”
The results weren’t better at all. I ended up on a page called “Bug of the Week,” on which a man soliloquized about how excited he was to watch the false milkweed bugs hang out on the false sunflowers near the DMV. He filmed them, and then he described his video:
“Watch as the bug on the left nonchalantly grooms its antennae while its mate taps its left hind leg somewhat impatiently while dining on a floret. Bugs are pretty entertaining.”
Page after page like this. False milkweed bugs: not good or bad. Just bugs. They eat milkweed, so if you don’t want your milkweed to get out of control, they can be considered “good.” (Or “bad” if you do want it to get out of control.) They don’t bite or sting; they don’t get in anyone’s way. They don’t really damage the plant. For their monthlong lifespan, they just are.1 And when you stop worrying about your kale or your toddler getting stung, the other thing that they are is quite beautiful. After realizing that I had been obsessed with the idea of assigning moral value to the milkweed bug, I stared at it for four minutes. How does nature come up with these colors and patterns? The angular, masklike details and the bold color-blocking — all amazing. I felt a little embarrassed that, as a person who has spent a long time in love with everything about birds, I really had no idea about insects.
And in general, haven’t I been spending a lot of effort lately evaluating, well, everything? This was a good day. A bad book. A good recipe. A bad conversation. A good outfit. A bad bike ride. Probably most things aren’t either one. Most things are false milkweed bug things. And all the pressure for things to succeed and be good enough or even salvageable so often keeps me from being alive now, in this particular moment, in this body that can look at bugs and breathe air and jauntily waggle.
My garden is not a good garden, but that doesn’t make it a bad garden. I can exist in my garden and experience every human emotion, or none of them. The four minutes I spent looking the now-iconic-to-me false milkweed bug I could have spent weeding at, or pruning, or relocating a doomed squash — but I spent them being alive with a bug, and that is another thing to do with one’s time. It’s a relief to not have to evaluate it.
Tell me about what you’re growing, if you want. (Or what you’re marveling at, if you want.)
Love,
Sophie
Parenting Paragraph
Things are moving rapidly. Suddenly T is learning a lot of words every day. It felt like she was learning one a day and now she is learning “scoops” of words. (“Scoops” is one of the words.) It’s not possible to keep up with the rate of growing anymore, and all of a sudden, the pictures from a year ago seem like that can’t be just a year ago, because that’s a whole different human being.
For the past eight months, she has been occupied building tableaus. They have become more complex, if slightly more predictable. (All dinosaurs, instead of owl, dinosaur, scrunchie, scrunchie, piece of floss.)
Like all insects, they are pollinators. Which is why people like to have bugs around in general, usually
"writerly" is better than "clickbait."
As a butterfly parent who has successfully raised three Monarchs this summer (and hopefully at least two more who are currently caterpillars munching milkweed on my back porch), I am very familiar with milkweed bugs! I have to knock a bunch off whenever I go out to get fresh leaves and they are incredibly beautiful. I am a big bug watcher in general and highly recommend it always. Loved this newsletter and the clever title!