Summer Love

This was a summer of doomed relationships for me. I found — and lost — a couple of pets. My mom doesn’t understand how I could become so attached, especially when these creatures are things she routinely squished in her youth. But these wonderful wigglies had me curious.

It all started with Frank and Harvey. Frank was the hardier of the two. I was fascinated watching him crawl from leaf to leaf, defoliating my almost dead tomato plant.

Frank and Harvey were tomato hornworms. You know, those menacing looking green worms with the spikes of death jutting from their bums.

My tomato plants fizzled spectacularly this year. So when I found a few worms working their way through what remained of the foliage, I decided to let nature take its course.

My mom, of course, was horrified. Some of her favorite (and more disturbing) gardening memories are of knocking those bright green buggers off the plants with a trowel (because she would never actually touch one) and listening to the “pop” as she stepped on it and ground it’s slimy, mushy, gushy body into the dirt.

I think they’re pretty cool and I feel profoundly sorry for them when predatory wasps’ eggs emerge from their bodies and the wasp larvae consume them from the inside out, basically turning them into zombies. The worms are dead, they just don’t know it yet.

Several of my new pals succumbed to the cotton ball-like protrusions that covered their bodies. The infected worms looked like green-handled scrub brushes with white bristles — until I humanely euthanized both worms and wasp larvae via the squish-everything-until-it’s-flat method.

So that left Frank and Harvey. Frank, a good four inches long, started to show signs of slowing down and possibly beginning the process of morphing into a 5-Spotted Hawk Moth. I found him one morning crawling across our deck faster than I’d ever seen him move in our meaningful, 2-week-long relationship. He had either gotten too heavy for the plant and had fallen off or he purposely was looking for someplace to begin his “change.”

Either way, I intervened and put him back in the pot with “his” tomato plant. He answered my attempts to “help” by immediately crawling out of the pot again (thus answering my earlier question). I, being the nosey, greedy human that I am, didn’t want him to disappear before witnessing his glorious transformation. So I put him in a plastic bucket with a lid and several dozen tomato leaves.

He was not happy. He crawled around and around and around. All the while, his bright green complexion faded more and more to an olive-brown.

“I think he’s dying,” I told one of my sons. “Just put him back in the pot one more time and see what happens,” the 25-year-old wonder-child suggested.

So I did. And Frank immediately burrowed his way into the soil. He went really far down, too, because I tried to dig down and find him (see mention of nosey, greedy human in an earlier paragraph). Google says (so you know it must be true) that it takes 7 to 14 days for a tomato hornworm to metamorphose into a 5-Spotted Hawk Moth. I am on Day 10.

Now on to Harvey, a baby half-inch worm with more of a splinter-like horn on his butt rather than a menacing spike of death.

Our relationship lasted a mere few hours. One minute he was happily munching tomato leaves and the next he was being stalked by a spider. I watched as the eight-legged monster slowly climbed the branch Harvey was dining on. It waited as patiently as, say, a spider stalking its prey. Then, suddenly, Harvey was hanging in the clutches of a little spider that was sucking Harvey’s life force away. Poor Harvey. You were a good pet and I loved you for a couple of hours.

So, unless Frank has gone dormant or died, all I have left is to see a 5-Spotted Hawk Moth dig its way out of the dirt, spread its wings, wait for them to expand (while hoping some bird doesn’t fly along and scoop him up for dinner) and then flitter away.

No matter the outcome, Frank and Harvey have left a small hole in my heart, like the holes they left behind on the tomato plant leaves. I’ve never had such an emotional summer love. But I am a better person because of it.

Related posts:

We are continually adding new Vetcove Cash Back Deals on popular brands for our Vetcove users so be sure to routinely check the Deals tab for the latest additions: Compounded Quad Tabs — save 15%…

The image that I thought off when this term was thrown around back in policy school was a group of nerds gathered in a room trying to predict the future while randomly spewing out crazy predictions…