We've had lots of caterpillars to interact with, and it's been a lesson in life and death. My son is at the age where he loves playing with bugs, but is only starting to conceptualize the difference between a dandelion tuft blowing about on the wind and an animal insect that is self moving. So he plays happily with the bugs, and occasionally they get smushed, most often by accident but sometimes out of curiosity. A few nights ago he and a friend were bringing one into show to my beloved life partner, when the caterpillar fell and alas was trod upon by the friend. Quite visibly smushed, to my son's great upset.
So last night, as we're coming in to get dinner going, he had brought a caterpillar in the house. As the adults were toodling around getting dinner ready, all of a sudden, I heard a very painful yowl go up from the kids, perhaps two yowls. It wasn't just run of the mill outrage over one sibling slight or another, the anguish sounded worth my moving from the kitchen. When I got there, my very upset daughter was holding the caterpillar and my son was wailing that she had stolen his caterpillar. It turns out he had 1/2 crushed the larva, and she was yelling that he was going to kill it. I said that it was a caterpillar that he had brought into the house. She said that it needed to go back to nature and that he was going to kill it. This sending of dead life back to nature has been a big theme between she I and for years, but I had to confess that her brother was just learning about bugs and their being alive and dying and so on, and that it was just part of being a small human that some bugs do get killed. She furiously gave it back to him and was so horrified at what I said that she retreated to her room for a good long time. My son was meanwhile yelling that he hadn't killed it and he wouldn't kill it and why wasn't it moving! After she left, I said that she'd been afraid that he'd kill it and that if it wasn't moving, perhaps it was already dead. He put it with great gentleness and concern on the ledge under the window, and I said that it might not be moving because it was scared that we were going to eat it or because it was hurt. We had a brief discussion about whether my son could eat the caterpillar (where I wasn't really sure about that; on the one hand, yuck, on the other hand, I'm sure our ancestors would have eaten some caterpillars, on the other hand, we just had aerial spraying to kill the caterpillars). So we let it alone on the ledge for a while, and it uncurled a tad and then appeared to die, which my son seemed to accept. When my daughter recovered from my apparent casual acceptance of the hecatomb of insect deaths perpetrated merely by young humans, she opened the window and returned the dead bug to nature.
So I thought it was over, with this interesting intersection of concern and inexperience and my own muddled thinking tossed in as well (at some point I had told my daughter that when she was 3, she'd killed a number of bugs as wells, which came out a bit meanly).
The next morning, now 24 hours after the spraying, my daughter and I were walking to school and she noticed a lot of dead caterpillars. I confessed that it was probably due to the spraying that the helicopters had done yesterday (oddly for some reason not attributing it to the nature of big humans) and that a lot of caterpillars had died. So we had a long talk about this spraying and killing. We had hiked last summer on the Appalachian Trail where gypsy moths had denuded a lot of trees that were very palpably dying, and while the moths where so thick in the air that you couldn't avoid them landing on you. So I explained that the spraying was to protect the trees from this one type of caterpillar. She asked the obvious follow-up question about other sorts of caterpillars, and I had to confess that many fine local caterpillars died as well.
In these beautiful spring days, in the midst of such bounteous scents and breezes and growth, death is not absent.
