The frustrated biologist

I’m talking about my mother, not me… even though I’m the one with the five-and-a-half-year-four-year-degree in biology…  She’s like a little frustrated biologist, crawling around on all fours, investigating all manner of living creature, plants, animals (mostly of the BUG variety…), and assorted fungi, whether or not the jury’s still out on the proper classification of the lowly fungi… is it a plant? Is it an animal? A predator? A parasite? A decomposer? Yes, well, definitely a decomposer…  But my mother, without discrimination,  she investigate’s ‘em all.

You know how many times she’s called me out to the yard to look at some THING she pulled off of someTHING else, and then picked it apart, yea verily, she dissected it with her thumbnails is what she did! It could be hard as a hickory nut, and she’d have it in pieces, and neatly laid out before her… just like you spread the poor frog out in Biology 101, with pins and tiny little white flags…

.

.

.

Sometimes it’s some sort of POD… which, takes a certain amount of bravery, doesn’t it, to plunge your thumbnails down into the gooshy innards of some unknown pod of unknown… contents… ewwwwww… but she does it! She does it in the name of Science!!!

and her unquenchable thirst for learning, exploration, and adventure!

One day a couple years ago, she showed up on my doorstep, clutching a repulsive little medicine jar of… preserved, ugly little red bugs, with squiggly black legs and … oh, just not cute. You know, a Ladybug is red with little black legs, but it has the sense to be sorta round and… polka-dotty. These bugs grew themselves until they were long and creepy, like they just didn’t know when to stop…

So Mom’s sloshing this jar all up in my face, I think she poured rubbing alcohol on ‘em, in the name of Science, and I’m all, MOM! Ick! Not cute bugs! Not cute at alllll!!!!  And she’s all, well, these are the bugs that your dad and I found on the milkweed plants in our rock garden (I love how she includes Dad, as if it deflects half of the GOOFINESS if Dad is involved… or maybe she thinks Dad carries more “street cred” with me… maybe she’s right…)

.

.

.

These were the bugs. See what I mean? VEry uncool. But crucial to one of Mom’s “investigations”. This particular investigation centered around  Mom’s milkweed crop (she grows it for the Monarchs, but that’s a whole ‘nother paragraph…), which was coming down with some sort of CRUD, like a slimy black crud, a creeping NOTHING, like the one in The Neverending Story, you know, they NOTHING

.

.

.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y688upqmRXo

BOOOOO Swamp of Sadness!!!

Just like The Nothing was swallowing Fantasia, and drowning  innocent, valiant white horses in the black, sucking, oily mud…and stuff… So too was this slimy black gunk coating the leaves of Mom’s milkweed,  threatening the very fiber of her little Monarch Caterpillar Rehabilitation Sanitorium and Infirmary (but that’s a whole ‘NOTHER paragraph…) And just like Atreyu, Mom could be seen, clutching and pulling and beating a dead horse, so to speak… You know she had Dad out there with a little bucket of soapy water, scrubbing those plants, leaf by leaf…  ARTAXXXXX!!!!!

So today she calls me and starts describing a bug…

…2 hours later, we have joined several internet investigational educational entomological websites, we have written our respective Congressmen about the offending SCOURGE, and we have hatched a battle plan, involving  some sort of rube-goldbergian combination of bleach, chewing gum, and a sling-shot… or something…

Advertisement