Author: Steph

The bucket of ladybugs is sitting on Ford’s lofted bed in the cool north exposure, the hundreds of ladybugs awake now in the advancing daylight and ravenously crawling over each other in the mysterious nutrient-shavings the were packaged with. I lay on Ford’s bed looking out the window now into the sunny patio as the boys flip pages in picturebooks atop the bed beside me in the quiet spot of our schedule just after lunch. At the top of a middle pane of glass, just under the white wooden frame, a bright red ladybud scales the perimeter and it is surely looking for that colony of aphids in that cluster of chives on the other side of the house. Or just a way to get outside, I reason. I roll my head back towards the bucket of ladybugs on the bed. Crawling as they ever were, teeming with purpose. A few unfortunate bugs are carelessly macerated between the clear lid and the bucket. Ford.

I pick up Island of the Blue Dolphins and leaf to the first page of the first chapter and begin to read. Words cascade off the page while I stand on a remote island in the Pacific northwest somewhere on a typically windy day, and I look out onto the glassy sea to find a ship with two red sails. But I know what a ship is. And I wonder what I would imagine this thing to be if I had never seen a ship before, and as I wonder out loud I ask the same question of Ford, who has begun to watch Seti ram his wet nose into the glass window at the foot of the bed in a senseless pursuit of a housefly. Chas is no longer listening either, and he has cracked a smile at the dog, along with his brother, as Seti continues to buffett the windowpane with ears all a tonic and the tenacity of an inbred terrier. I lay the book on my chest and the boys reel in delight as Seti smacks his lips and eats the stupid fly.

Ford and Chas have two buckets of ladybugs in their hands at the local nursery and they are looking at the hundreds of them crawling inside the bucket. The bucket is filled with shavings and they tilt the container round like a gyroscope on some invisible axis before them, trying to see all those ladybugs as if in an effort to count them all the clear platic tub, behind the bilengual paragraphs of instructions and disclaimers and branding on the package’s outer skin. I have found a boutique huechera, Key Lime Pie, and return to my own set of disclaimers with narrowed eyes for a few seconds before their intense excitement catches up to their awe. Chas has redefined priorities and the circular sprinkler attachment, the one he has been carrying around for fifteen minutes: brown plastic with ten black prongs, used in this manner as an alien spacecraft, is laid to rest momentarily on the nursery’s potting table, beside eight other buckets of ladybugs. Ford has set a diode battery-powered dragonfly necklace with blinking red light on the table already. The area has become a still life, a shelf of curiosities for the young collector.

“Mommy, can we get some ladybugs? we really need a whole bunch of ladybugs for those aphids in the chives. Please, mom?” Ford pleads and Chas steps up behind him, “Yeah, dey’re so tool! We got a WOT of wadybugs Ford, huh? Yeah! Wet’s go put em in de aphids in a gawden now Arrrr! Jus wike in ‘Bug’s Wife’ huh?! (begins to reenact a scene from said movie, very physically carrying the ladybug bucket into his character as he stomps down an aisle of shade-tolerant plants, splattering water puddles along the way. Ford continues to peer in through the clear plastic container while I watch Chas roam, half my face smiling and biting my lip at the same time.

The winding drive down 92’s western slope was typically satisfying, the exuberant decline through the winding fertile gap towards Half Moon Bay set me reeling for the low tide, earmarking time later in the day for the nursery that I breathlessly passed along the way.

We plop down immediately on the beach and the boys begin carving into the coarse, wet sand. In the distance, atop the rocks on the outer reef, gray harbor seal pups shimmy up to their enormous basking mothers and settle back down. The surging surf swells back into the ocean, returns seconds later, breaks upon the shining boulders and the seals hoist flippers above the white surf. The boys are building alien spacecraft and reenacting battle. I am sitting crosslegged, smelling a rotting rockfish that I hadn’t yet noticed, which is drying in the noontime sun and it’s close enough to where we are sitting that I can discriminate white swim bladder tangled in other viscera. We have so many bags, we just sat down, the boys are building. There is no sense moving yet, until they stop playing and notice the smell. I put my book down and walk to the upper intertidal pools.

You aren’t supposed to pick up rocks. Beneath rocks, small animals hide during low tide. To pick up a rock undermines their efforts to survive; anything can come along and notice them in this hostile little pool, which is heating up by the minute, already a stressful enough for any small Pacific animal stranded in a small pool, and the salinity is heightening at the same time. It is a small, ragged rock perched in the middle of the very shallow pool.

Still, I pick up the rock. The kids aren’t watching me. Nobody is watching me. I feel like I’m trying to rob a bank in this kind of stealth. I lift the rock gingerly about six inches above the pool. A small crab crouches, freezes. A serpentine fish slinks into the nearest algae frond. I take the half dollar-sized crab and transfer it to a neigboring pool so that it can hide again, and turn to examine the fish.

It’s small, the length of my index finger, the width of a chopstick. It is brown, with a tiny tailfin and a cerebral noggin, eyes set close and undoubtedly fixed on me, perhaps my own eyes. I think it’s pouting. In the dark shadow of the red algae I can barely discern other features, but I know enough; this is a monkeyface eel.

I search for a vacant space and set the rock down, a few inches from where it once stood. By this time, the kids are tossing sand at each other and before I can reach the dispute, Chas is screaming about the sand in his eyes that Ford threw, and Ford is laying a screaming claim on his innocence. Time for lunch.