The Mother, the Boy, the Bugs, and the Truth

It was oppressively hot. The kind of hot that immediately melts the ice in your iced tea, skipping from cold directly to lukewarm. It was the kind of hot that rendered many a young lady's face a seeming rictus of pain not long at all after melting off every last molecule of makeup. It was the kind of hot that made the gnats leave their nests to find somewhere with water where they could dive-bomb for respite in exchange for their brief lives. Something about the heat woke both the cicadas and the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes could be diverted by running a fan near the patio. Apparently, the low velocity of the air the fan stirred disrupted their ability to fly toward their targets as intended; and the cicadas always seemed to awaken in the heat-soaked doldrums of mid- to late-August.

Her husband enjoyed the song of the cicadas. But with the cicadas came the cicada-killer wasps. The first time she had seen one, she was 37. It had flown into the garage, where there were decidedly no cicadas. It was trapped between the blind and the window in the garage. From the the tip of one wing to the other, it was as wide as her hand. It had a shiny pale yellow and black striped body, and its wings were translucent red. The size terrified her. Once glance at the thing told her it was a hymenoptera. She didn't know what kind it was exactly, but she knew enough that she didn't want to chance getting stung to find out.

She turned to her sweet 3-year old in the backseat. "Let's get you out of your car seat, okay? We're going to play a game. It's a mystery game. What do you say?"

"I like games," he said matter-of-factly.

"Great. It's going to be a funny little race. When I say 'go,' you get out of the car, open your car door, get out of the car, close the car door, then run into the house and slam the door right behind you. I'll time you, and we'll figure out who's faster. Does that sound fun?" she asked, injecting her voice with what she thought 'fun' sounded like, and she hoped it didn't sound like hysteria.

"Mommy. It sounds kind of weird. I don't know any games like that," her toddler said soberly. He always made 'Mommy,' sound like a complete sentence, like all the logic in the world was wrapped into that single word.

"Well, it's more of an experiment. It's science. Let's see who's faster, and we'll talk about it. Sound good?" Her little guy was such a firecracker, and he didn't miss anything.

"Mommy. Do you see that big bug in the window?" He pointed. She was not going to tell him she thought the bug might sting them then potentially eat their brains for two reasons:

1. She didn't know exactly what the bug ate, and she didn't want to lie to her little guy; and

2. She didn't want him to know she was terrified of this ridiculous bug that was probably 1/1000 of her size.

She had always been told never to show fear in front of children for two reasons:

1. If you tipped your head hand and showed them the fear card, they would wield it against you and leverage their way into candy, cars, drugs, booze, and worse; and

2. If you showed that you were afraid, then they'd learn to be afraid, too. Truth be told, wouldn't bug fear be a horrible fear to pass along to a child?

"Okay, listen, dude. You're going to run into the house as fast as you can so that thing doesn't chase us. Got it?"

"Yup," he answered.

Well, who knew? Reality trumped fun and science.

"I'll be right behind you," she said. "Don't slam the door in my face."

They watched the bug, and when she thought it looked like it was pretty busy in the window, she said with urgency, "Go. Now." They both scrambled from the car and into the house. Once the door was shut, they looked at each other and, initially, little giggles spilled from their lips, then full-blown laughter, and on the wind down, there were some guffaws that came down to a brief giggle or a smile, and then finally, a gentle nod of the head.

She poured milk into a sippy cup and counted out eight animal crackers for her boy. "Shall we look up what that thing in the garage is?"

"Are we going to look on the computer, on the internet?" he asked, and he was bouncing in his seat with excitement.

"Careful, bud. Would you rather eat your snack under the table?" she asked.

He nodded with vigorous agreement. She took her laptop out of her work bag and joined her son under the table.

"Let's see," she muttered as she pulled up Google. "I'm going to type in hymenoptera."

"Why?" he asked. "What does hyma-whatever mean?"

"It's just Latin for 'stinging bug,'" she said as she tapped away on the keys. Eventually they landed on a site called, 'What'sThatBug.com.' She typed in the description of the bug, and after viewing a few varieties of stinging bugs, they found the thing flying around in their garage. "It says here that what's in our garage is a Cicada-Killer Wasp. Blah, blah, blah. Not aggressive toward humans."

"What does that mean for us?" he asked.

"If we don't bother him, he won't bother us." She waited a moment. "Do you hear all the racket outside, though?"

He looked at her, a question in his eyes.

"It sounds very loud, like a million crickets chirping. Outside."

He continued to look at her while they sat under the table.

"Finish your animal crackers. I'm not going to talk anymore. Pay close attention to everything you hear while you eat. Okay?"

He nodded.

When he finished eating and drinking from his sippy cup, his mother asked, "What did you hear?"

"I heard my animal crackers crackling and breaking against my teeth, then I heard myself drinking and swallowing my milk."

"Oh, good. You know there was more going on that just your teeth ripping into the animal cracker," she said, looking him in the eye. She knew he knew this, too. They had discussed alpha amylase many, many times. She also knew he was three, and he was only keeping track of mission critical details, and enzymes in the saliva were novel, not vital. "I'll buy some Saltines, and we'll do an experiment next week. You'll enjoy it."

"Did I hear what I was supposed to hear?" he asked.

She reached out to her toddler, ruffling his blonde hair. It was like cornsilk, and she knew it wasn't going to stay. In fact, looking at the strands of hair on her own father's head seemed to bear out that her little man would probably look forward to a handful of hairs making it to the finish line, fighting against time and one another to see who would reign supreme. "You did. Now. Let's be careful getting out from under the table and go outside."

On the porch, they sat on patio chairs, across from one another. "What do you hear? Is it quiet? Is it loud?"

"Mommy."

"Yes?"

"It's so loud," he said. "It's the bugs, right? They're rubbing their legs together?"

"They make noise in a different way than grasshoppers, but you have noticed the noise, their song. Would you like to know something about cicadas? It's only the males who make the noise. The other thing is that they're very destructive to trees. Nature's way of dealing with the cicadas and the damage is this." She wriggled her fingers in the air like a magician and sang, "Dun-dun-dun-dun."

He looked at her fingers like they were going to produce something. He was rapt, spellbound. She knew she would have only a few more years before he would fact-check most everything, but for now, she was his conduit to information and the world around him. "The cicada killer wasps take the cicadas hostage and use them for food. They keep them alive, though, because they can last as food for a long time—but only if they're living. The wasp will lay eggs under the cicada, and when the eggs hatch, the babies will also eat the cicada. Eventually, the cicada will die because the babies grow and can leave the cocoon. But the wasps are kind of heroes to the trees."

"Really?" he asked, "Because, Mommy. They seem like they're vampires on the cicadas. The wasps seem mean to the cicadas."

"They do, don't they? Well, the cicadas eat through the branches and bark of the trees and make the trees weak and susceptible to disease. We need trees. We need lots and lots of trees. We need them to continue to release oxygen into the air. If we let the cicadas go crazy, then we have fewer trees and less good stuff in the air."

He blinked. He blinked again and again. "Can we draw a picture?"

"Of course," she said.

They went inside and drew pictures of the trapped cicada killer wasp in the garage. They drew pictures of trees and cicadas. They made a story board to show her husband. She knew it was kind of a gruesome story, but she thought natural science was kind of gruesome, but beautiful, too.

"Mommy, I made you a picture. Do you want to see?"

She nodded.

"Close your eyes," he said, and he placed his paper just in front of where she had been drawing. "Okay. Open."

There was a tree, and its trunk brandished a smile. In the sky were a sun with a smile, and several clouds, fluffy and smiling, too. There was a girl or woman with wild brown hair, in a pink dress, and she had wings of a pale red color that seemed to spread for most of the page. In the woman's hand, she held a magic wand with a cicada killer wasp at the terminus. In the background were red-winged bees who were smiling, and in the distance were clumps of trees or maybe broccoli, all smiling.

He looked shyly at his mother. "What do you think?"

Her voice cracked, "I love it, honey. I just love it. Is that me, with the wand?"

"Mommy." He looked at her. "Who else could it be? You're magic."