Insects

I need to wash my windshield again. All day I’ve been committing murder by 70 mph as the column of insects that inhabit the air smash against my windshield. Most of them I don’t even see, but sometimes the thunk of a beetle leaves a spray of amber fluid or a wing flashes and catapults over my roof with a powder of scales left behind. It’s the butterflies and dragonflies that I mourn the most.

I first fell in love with butterflies at age five. Entering the old bio lab, I turned immediately to the chest on my right, its drawers each no more than three inches high. The lab was a low building, big enough to hold twelve students in a classroom or in the perpendicular wings of the greenhouse. The chest stood in a corner of the greenhouse surrounded by the smells of warm soil and growing things.

Inside lay butterflies. Their wings, yellow, orange, blue, lay spread and pressed between two panes of glass, rimmed in a black frame. I sought out the familiar monarch and swallowtail, and always, I worked toward the iridescent blue Morpho. Holding my hand against the glass, its wings were still visible beyond my fingers. I thought they would dim or dull but they shone on as I tilted the frame back and forth in the light.

I heard a story recently on NPR called the Billion Bug Highway about the multitude of insects that travel the air all the time, mating, pollinating or just dispersing to a less crowded or more favorable location (should the wind send them that way).

And here they are, one splat after another slowly obscuring my view. I grieve their passing with a wrinkle of my forehead and clenched jaw. Then, when I stop for gas, I plunge a squeegee in its bucket and wash them away.