Nature Talks.

There was a red smear on my arm where I’d slapped a mosquito. It’s not even really summer yet and already I can’t sit out on the patio at dusk without being poked by at least a dozen tiny needles. It’s like a visit to the emergency room, but the bill doesn’t come in the mail—it shows up as a bunch of tiny, itchy red bumps. Some years mosquitoes completely ignore me, and supposedly what you eat can keep them away. As a kid I was told swallowing a spoonful of vinegar kept mosquitoes and other parasites away, and from what I’ve read eating a lot of onions, garlic, and beans will deter both mosquitoes and everyone else. As I looked at that red stain on my arm and the crushed mosquito body, such a dangerous, even deadly thing and yet so tiny and fragile, I started to feel something for the mosquitoes. I wouldn’t call it sympathy but I felt a kind of understanding of them. I’m not ignoring the fact that mosquitoes are responsible for at least a million deaths a year—even if it is indirect. The diseases they carry, especially malaria, cause so much suffering. Still the mosquitoes didn’t ask to be carriers. They just want to pop in, fill up on a few milligrams of a protein drink—which just happens to be blood—and go on. And eliminating the mosquitoes isn’t a great solution because there are so many other insects, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles that feed on mosquitoes that they’re an important, if extremely annoying, link in a lot of food chains. Malaria, on the other hand, we could do without. Malaria is the guy who shows up at a party and says, “You know, homelessness could be eliminated if people would settle for renting instead of getting into debt with a mortgage” and no one knows who invited him.

Also there have been a lot of times when I’ve been bitten by mosquitoes without even realizing it. They have the decency to inject an anesthetic when they plunge their snouts into our skin, and mostly it works. Sometimes it doesn’t and I’ll feel a little sting. Again it’s like going to the doctor’s office. Some nurses can slide a needle right in and I won’t feel a thing and some jab me and leave me feeling it for at least an hour afterward, and once a nurse said “You’re going to feel a little prick” and I said “You could at least take me out to dinner and a movie first” and somebody else had to come in and draw my blood, but that’s another story.

There is something amazing about the tiny, fragile mosquito. Just a few drops of our red corpuscles can produce hundreds, even thousands. And think about them this way: they’re shapeshifters, transforming from aquatic wrigglers to denizens of the air. They emerge at dusk, find an unsuspecting victim, and drink its blood.

The last thing that went through that mosquito’s mind was the flat of my hand. But I wonder if the next to last thing that went through its mind was, “Sure, when vampires do it you think they’re all sexy and cool, but when we do it we’re a nuisance.”

Then again I’ve never heard of a vampire bringing malaria to a party.

April showers have brought out the slugs. Like a lot of common animals I have a history with slugs and it’s not all happy. When I was a kid my mother showed me how to kill slugs by pouring salt on them and I went up and down the sidewalk at night with a big container of the “when it rains it pours”, pouring it all over every slug I could find. The next morning I’d find shriveled leathery bodies like three-dimensional commas, an interrupted life sentence.

Why did I hate the slugs so much? I can’t explain it because I loved snails. I collected snails, built little terrariums for them in empty jars, and spent hours watching them. Slugs were just escargot liberated from the extra cargo of a shell. If anything they deserved more respect for daring to go bare, but I think it was the lack of a shell that bothered me. Snails are builders, architects. They make a refuge and carry it with them, and I could pick up a snail without getting slimed, although I also let them crawl up and down my arm. Slugs, I thought, lived up to their name: sluggish. Lazy. Fat. Stupid. Slugs are unstamped coins. Big, slow moving boats. Hit somebody hard enough and you say you slugged them. And according to the Oxford English Dictionary was an insulting term for people long before it was applied to the gastropod.

That’s imposing a lot on slugs, none of it true. Well, I don’t know about slug intelligence, but their bodies are all muscle, as some friends who decided to fry them up in garlic butter since it was cheaper than going to a French restaurant discovered, and slugs can move pretty quickly, although I guess they have enough natural defenses that most of the time they don’t need to. Most animals either know or, like my friends, discover that slugs aren’t that appetizing.

I’m sure I’d also feel differently if we lived on the west coast where banana slugs are found and are even a school mascot because they’re amazing. I’d probably feel the same way about them that I did about snails. And I’ve always found sea slugs fascinating, from when I first read about them in my Jacques Cousteau books to when, on a trip to Florida, I found some hanging onto a piece of driftwood. They had amber bodies and azure gills. I carried them to the house where we stayed in Florida in a bucket with some sand and rocks and seaweed and watched them for hours. They crawled all over their temporary plastic home, occasionally swimming by curling and uncurling until they floated up to the surface then drifted back down. The next day I took them back to the beach and released them to the sea, not wanting them to die in captivity.

They lived in salt, the same stuff I used to destroy their terrestrial cousins. I don’t know if that’s what changed my mind about the sidewalk slugs but after that I let them pass.

When I was a kid I read a book of Cherokee legends. The story of the beginning of the world stayed with me because, according to it, all animals, plants, and trees were tested by having to stay awake for seven days and nights. Some animals—rabbits, mice, even deer—fell asleep. They became prey for the ones who stayed awake: the mountain lion, the wolf, the owl. Some of the trees managed to stay awake too. These were the pine and cedar, so they would be evergreen. Other trees didn’t pass the test, and I still remember the line: “Unable to stay awake they would sleep part of each year, and lose their hair in winter.”

I’d never thought of leaves as tree hair before that, and not just because leaves grow back while most people I know who lose their hair lose it permanently, but I still liked the phrase. And yet it didn’t explain what, to me, was the biggest mystery of all: why so many people felt it necessary to rake and bag leaves in their yards. Most put the leaves in their garbage cans, as though the trees were purposely throwing trash around. It seems like an insult to the trees. It would be different if they were sneaking over to someone else’s yard and throwing down a bunch of leaves then running back in the middle of the night, like a bunch of kids having a toilet paper party. That is something I did once—a toilet paper party, I mean, not dropping a bunch of leaves, and even though I was a teenager at the time it still seemed like a stupid thing to do.

And at least leaves are bio-degradable. Technically toilet paper is too, but leaves land there naturally, and toilet paper tends to stand out against the landscape, at least as long as it’s fresh out of the package and hasn’t been used previously, but that’s another story.

Why clear away leaves? People love to see the changing colors: the reds and yellows of trees on hills in the all-too short, beautiful time before the fall to the ground, before they turn brown and papery and crackle underfoot. Once the leaves have been shed they blanket the ground providing insulation, protection, safe spaces for next year’s insects, and nesting material for squirrels and other animals. They’ll give back to the soil what they took from it, passing it on to the next generation. A clean yard is a terrible thing, the rake and leaf blower instruments of destruction.

Well, I do use them to keep the leaves away from the doors. Tracked in underfoot they won’t do anyone any good. We don’t need leaves in the house, where we sleep.