themeyerwire

I read a book in Elementary School called How to Eat Fried Worms. Inside the book, a 10 year old and his friends form a bet; they bet that he cannot eat Fried Worms for lunch for 15 days. I won’t spoil the book for you, but for me it was a delightful read (granted, that was 12 years ago). While I haven’t been eating fried worms, I have had two interesting encounters with them.

The first incident occurred a couple of weeks ago as I was waiting for the bus. As I was waiting, I noticed a worm wriggling across the cement sidewalk. Afraid that someone would step on the worm or that it would fry as it was intensely hot outside, I moved the worm to some nearby bushes using a leaf. No sooner had the worm fallen onto the grass than a lizard lurched forth from the bushes, grabbed the worm, and ate it in front of me. I found this mildly humorous as I had never seen a lizard eat a worm before; he ate it kind of like a snake eats its pray. In the very action that I had attempted to save the worm, I had actually led it to its imminent death.

The second incident occurred a few days after the first as I was mopping my apartment. After mopping, I took the hot, Pine-Sol laden water outside to dump it in our apartment’s rock courtyard wasteland. Previously, I had thought the wasteland uninhabitable as it often floods and is overflowing with cigarette butts and other random trash (which after the flooding, often finds its way to our doorstep). As I dumped the water into the rocks, a horde of insects, cockroaches, and worms began to emerge, writhing in the contaminated water. In two acts that I had thought harmless, I had actually caused the death of numerous worms.

In another note, I have wanted to plant a tree in our courtyard to help with the flooding problem. Plants in the area would help soak up the water and hopefully eliminate the accumulation of filth outside of our doorstep. After dumping the mop water in the courtyard, the abundance of worms and insects informed me that the soil underneath is extremely fertile, and thus hospitable to the possibility of future plant life: this makes me happy.