“Mom, look. There’s a moth with two heads!” Declan’s staring at the moth on the side of the house.
I look. Sure enough, there are two heads there. The thing is, they’re not near each other, as one would expect in a hydra-moth, they’re perfectly inverted. This isn’t a two-headed moth. It’s a rated R situation.
We sit for a while and stare at nature’s miracle, the two-headed moth. Declan wonders if it talks to itself. If it’s lucky because it doesn’t need another friend? If the two-heads argue? I snap a picture, because I know I’m going to write about this later.
The boy realizes something’s up when the dog tries to “dance” with another dog or a piece of furniture but the moth(s) have escaped his notice. After a year intensely studying bugs, Declan can recite every scientific name, categorization, and species of bug, and how it relates to the local, national, and universal ecosystems as well as global warming trends.
He’s never once asked where bugs come from. They just do. “Egg sack, larva, pupa, nymph, adult.” The cycle continues. No questions asked. That means we don’t have to have “The Talk” again.
Girls can stay yucky, mud will be cool, and the two-headed moth is the two-headed moth just like the four-leaf clover is the four-leaf clover. All very good things.
It’s summer, time for our brains to be free.
We’ll save such conversations for the fall, when they’ll be a nice break in the homework.
For now, I take another picture of the two-headed moth, nature’s miracle, and we head inside before the rain.
Yep, that’s a bonafide bug “lovefest” you’ve captured there! I love the innocence of your boy and hope you don’t have to have “that talk” for a while yet. 🙂 Kids are being asked to grow up too fast it seems. I keep saying to my 12 yr. old daughter that just because all the other girls are running head long to look like they are 16- doesn’t mean she has to!