Shiny Bugs

Probably because Canada has ten months of winter and two months of something resembling summer, I don’t remember that there were a lot of bugs; too cold to live long in those northern climes, but I always loved shiny bugs. I remember watching one particular Twilight Zone episode with my brother about a very shiny scarab bug that kept a woman young. The old lady in the show talked about the bug’s long Egyptian history. It later turned out that the old lady was the young woman’s daughter but by that time my brother and I were too fascinated about the shiny bug to remember how the story ended, although we knew it could not have been good. We looked up the bug in the library’s encyclopedia and were so disappointed to learn that we were not going to live forever.

In the summer we were shipped off to our maternal grandparents’ farm near Woodstock. My grandmother loved peonies and had a huge garden filled with several varieties. I loved those flowers too and would lay on the grass for hours, watching the ants eat the sugar off the buds, then wait for the flowers to bloom. When they did bloom, I would stick my nose in the flowers to smell their perfume and inevitably some errant ant would find its way up my nose. It was worth it. Even today, I keep a bed of peonies at the front of the house. 

Summer nights in July would find me walking among the magical fireflies. I imagined myself a fairy princess as they blinked on and off around me. My brother’s attitude towards them was somewhat more prosaic. He constantly tried to catch them in jars; an exercise in futility, I thought, since the fireflies would not glow on demand as he wanted them to do. When fall arrived and I was back in school, I learned that fireflies are really bugs and not flies. These days, I see them around here during the long summer nights. They are still magical and I would still like to be Malificient. 

As a young adult, I headed west to California and joined the Sierra Club, not because of any particular ideology, but because the Sierra Club sponsored a semi-weekly five mile twilight hike through Griffith Park during the summer months. The hike took us through various parts of the park, allowing us to see the Griffith Observatory or the Hollywood sign up close,  and that was where I saw my first batch of glow worms perched on the side walls of the hiking trails. The girls were a shiny pink color that glowed to lure their boyfriends. I was fascinated by them.

Much to my hiking group’s amusement and/or pique, since I can’t carry a tune, I would nonetheless sing to the glow worms as I passed them by, remembering the old song Glow Little Glow Worm by the Mills Brothers:

Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer

Hey, there don't get dimmer, dimmer

Light the path below, above

And lead us on to love!

Admittedly, I never found love in Griffith Park but I did find glow worms, which are not worms, per se, but too are bugs.