It’s a Bugs World

I don’t know about y’all, but I love a good play. Especially, if it’s a good play with cute little kids dressed up as cute little insects dancing on stage singing cute little insect songs. My daughter was in such a play not too long ago. She was dressed as a dragonfly, standing on stage with a few bees, a couple of ants, and four “Beatles” singing “I want to sting you, yeah, yeah, yeah.” It was adorable. They even recited this charming bug poem by Christina Rossetti.

Hurt no living thing

Ladybug, nor butterfly,

Nor moth with dusty wing,

Nor cricket chirping cheerily

Nor grasshopper so light of leap

Nor dancing gnat, nor beetle fat,

Nor harmless worms that creep.

These words were, indeed, charming . . . just like the concept of cute bugs. That was until we left home to live on a teeny tiny island in the middle of a great big lake up north for a couple of weeks.
Now, I don’t know if y’all know this, but the Granite State is unique in the fact that 90% of its land is covered in vast forests. This means that most humans only occupy 10% of it and the other 90% is ruled by slimy, creepy, crawly, biting, bloodsucking insects. They sneak into your hair, land on your back without asking first, and snuggle up with you on your pillow without getting your name. You even start having your own little conversations with them since they’re always following you around. “Sorry, Daddy Longs,” my youngest tells him as she slips into her kayak, sending the little guy packing with her paddle. “You can’t come with me this time.”
See, hurt no living thing proves to be pretty hard since you never know when:

A tick’s embedded in your head and deep down in your skin

Or a leech at lunch will take a munch directly on your chin

Black flies will bite, day and night, no telling where they’ve been

It’s just you and them, but them times ten, and ten, and ten, and ten



I know what you’re thinking. I’m certainly no Robert Frost, or Christina Rossetti, but do you see what I’m getting at here? What does happen when living things hurt you? I mean really hurt you.
I was thinking about this the other day when my older daughter, always looking for an adventure, scaled her skinny arms and legs up a tree to grab a rope and swing herself into the lake. Instead of an adventure, she found a wasps’ nest . . . three stings under her arm, two on her thumb. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in that much pain.
“It hurts, so bad,” she tells me.

“I know,” I reply.

There was nothing much I could do but hold her and let her cry; the poison finding its way under her skin just like the guilt was finding its way under mine. I wished with all my being that those wasps had found me instead. But they hadn’t. I held her there for a long time until the worst of the pain subsided and she caught her breath.
God knows we have all been through it before. I think as parents we’ve already found out long ago there are plenty of things out there that can hurt us. We know it’s not just wasps, and spiders, and mites. People, situations, and experiences can sting just as painfully. We try to learn from them, to know these feelings intimately and recognize them so we don’t have to feel them ever again. Only now we have to watch our children find out for themselves that pain, this inevitable pain, is part of growing up.
“It hurts,” she says again.

“I know,” I tell her.
It’s times like these when I’m glad I’m getting older. I wouldn’t go back, even if I could. It seems that I’ve finally figured out a way not to let certain things bother me so much anymore. Things like anger, fear, resentment and disappointment.

These emotions are like the sting of the wasp. They leave a nasty poison under your skin. If you find a way to release it, even the most painful things will fade with time. But if you hang on to them, analyze them, turn the thought of them over and over again in your head, they just stay there, pulsating right under the surface of it all, threatening to rise up again and again and again.
“It doesn’t hurt so much anymore,” she tells me after awhile.
“I know,” I tell her once again.
I watch from the dock as she heads back to the rope swing, the wasp nest now gone though not forgotten. She smiles as she looks up at the rope hanging still from a thick branch. I can tell by her expression that the pain is already fading into a memory. In its place is a story. A story about what happened to a little nine year-old girl one summer at the lake when she climbed a tree looking for an adventure.

I hear a splash next to me in the water and hear the welcoming sound of her laughter. I swat a fly away from my forehead, and think to myself that I’ve never been more proud of her.