Squirmy Wormy

In a 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, Al Gore claimed: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." I am forever in his debt for the Internet. I can hardly even remember the days when I used to waste countless hours that would've been better spent sleeping (or studying, or working, or writing, or living) in front of the antiquated black box that my elders refer to as the boob tube. No more TV for me. Now, procrastination finds me courtesy of Facebook and online fantasy baseball. Ah, Al Gore giveth, but he also taketh away. Another of his inventions, global warming, has down right ruined the once cool and breezy Blue Ridge Mountain summers of my wayward youth. Upper 70s = windows and screen doors open and the peaceful song and dance of chirping toads chasing chirping crickets. Upper 80s = an expensive call to the friendly HVAC technicians at Watauga Heating & Cooling. They were so friendly, in fact, that they used Senator Gore's technology to download countless hours of pornography to my PC while doing the install. I imagine they probably just tacked on "Cooling" as an after thought since no one really needs air conditioning in the mountains. Right? Not any more, thanks to Senator Gore. I’m not suggesting some grand conspiracy theory—I don’t think the porn industry and Gore are somehow “in bed” together, leading to countless porn downloads by countless HVAC techs across the globe—but, regardless, no longer are my late night (porn-free) surfing hours accompanied by nature's music; instead, the steady hum of the ironically named heat pump drones on.

(Before I go on, I would like to apologize if you got a distasteful mental image when I mentioned Al Gore, the porn industry, and “in bed” above, all in the same sentence.)

So what does any of this have to do with the boy? Well, Silas, who has an aversion to wearing clothes anyway, didn't seem to mind the heat. He was not yet two at the time, and the promise of central cooling gently circulating pet dander throughout the house wasn't enough motivation to get him to suspend his constant desire to be held and/or played with. I had to 86 an old stack of mostly rotten firewood to clear a spot for the air conditioning unit. It was a sizable stack, but with only normal delays for freaking out every time an upset section of log revealed a giant snake or spider, I could've knocked out the job in about an hour or two. But the wheelbarrow wasn't full once before the boy, already bored with the dump truck load of toys I hauled out to the yard for the occasion, took to writhing and crying in the grass. I might've stuck him in front of the TV and gotten back to work, but, at not yet two, his taste for TV was still undeveloped. I couldn't even trust it to get an uninterrupted shower in, much less a project in the yard. And besides, I was still idealistic enough as a fledgling parent at this point to think that I would be forever limiting his exposure to the evils of television. Fortunately, I did have just the thing for this, our trusty backpack. Before I loaded any more wood, I loaded up the boy, snapped him in, and slung him over my back. He directed the rest of the project contentedly from his perch between dad's shoulder blades. More projects have been neglected than completed over the years, I'm afraid, but the backpack quickly became an integral tool whenever dad became motivated to tackle chore time. It was particularly useful for doing dishes and laundry; you can only wear the same shirt so many days in a row.

The backpack: it's how house and yard work gets done.

It doesn't work so well for inside jobs, but by the time the boy outgrew the backpack I had discovered another method for making yard work manageable: earthworms ("squirmy wormies" in boyspeak). I don't know if Al Gore invented the earthworm, but they seem to be thriving in our little corner of the warmed globe. Every time a bored and attention-starved Silas approaches, one needs only to turn a bit of earth, pluck out a worm, and—voila!—five or ten minutes of uninterrupted time to get back to work. He takes some leaves, a bit of dirt, and makes a "quarium" for them. The little trunk of his tricycle, the backs of dump trucks, Tupperware containers—if it will hold worms, it has. The health of our yard and garden, robbed of the benefits of so many worms, would probably be considerably improved had we not discovered how much the boy loves them, and my conscience doesn't care to count how many of them have been martyred in the name of weekend warrioring in the yard. Collecting squirmies is not in and of itself the problem, it's the not letting them go. Invariably, a dump truck is left out in the rain, and its bed becomes a watery grave for floating, bloating worms. Or a Tupperware bowl goes untended for a few days under Al Gore's sizzling sun, shriveling and finally baking its occupants. Now Silas has become pretty adept at capturing and sequestering squirmies all by himself. Instead of constantly badgering me about my progress in detecting them, he'll burst around the corner, worms snapping back and forth in both hands as he bounces up and down, and shout "squirmy wormies!" For a few minutes anyway, I’ll plod on with my yard work—no weed is safe.

I’ve been working on convincing Silas to do the environmentally responsible thing and practice catch and release. Ol' Al, not to mention countless captured squirmies, would surely appreciate that.

Delicious and nutritious.

Nightcrawler tiara. It's what all the cool kids will be wearing this summer.