There Are No Creatures You Cannot Love

 There Are No Creatures You Cannot Love

 

“Aaaaah! A spider!”

“Oh,” I said calmly. “Be careful not to hurt her.”

“I hate spiders! I wish every spider in the world were destroyed!”

I remembered saying almost exactly the same thing when I’d been about his age. My father had said, “Think of how many flies there’d be if there were no spiders.” It was an especially pointed thought just now, because the shed was teeming with flies.

I said, “Calm down, hon. If there were no spiders, we’d have to eat all of these flies ourselves.”

That got his attention. Ru gave a start, then laughed.

“Okay, you’re right. I know I have arachnophobia.”

That was typical of all of my kids. I talked to them as though they were adults, and they used adult vocabulary. It wasn’t even especially noteworthy for a five-year-old to use a six-syllable word that way.

“You do know that there are only three or four kinds of spider in the whole world that can even bite humans, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I remember Vicky told me that when I got that sliver in my hand.”

Poor guy. He’d been so afraid of a spider running over his arm while he was pulling a toy out of a crevice in the wall that he’d yanked it back abruptly, catching a long splinter and also barking his elbow.

I lifted a heavy piece of electronics we were saving to give to Harai when she visited next and found the source of the smell, which was also the source of the flies.

“You might find this interesting, Ru.”

“Wow, what is it?”

“It’s a possum that died back here. It’s all rotted away except for the bones and the skin. We could probably save the skull, and maybe the skin, for a craft project. I’ll get a dustpan for it, and we can take it into the kitchen and see. The rest can go in the compost.”

As I was scooping it up, Ru asked, “What happened to the rest of the possum?”

“Probably the flies ate it. When they were baby maggots, that is. Ate all the meat and left the skin and bones. And the stink.”

He laughed.

“I guess even flies are helpful, aren’t they?”

“They’ve all got a place in the world. It’s not like they were put here by an evil spirit to annoy us.”

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Beelzebub, 'Lord of the Flies', was a typo. He was actually Beelzebul, 'Lord of the Temple'."