vituperation

I meet all sorts of new and interesting characters when I’m among the trees.
Usually they end up on me.

And it’s happened so much they no longer eek me out.
Know why?

Because they’re more scared of me than I am of them.

“The begonia’s going to die if we don’t replant it,” I said. Robyn and I stood on our driveway near the car, preparing to run an errand. The plant in question was a get-well gift from Robyn’s parents back when I had my shoulder surgery, and it’s been sitting on the driveway in a nursery pot for almost four weeks.

Us, lazy? Perish the thought.

“It’s just wilted,” Robyn said. “A little bit of water and it’ll perk right up.”

The neighborhood bustled with activity. Kids played a couple of houses away, and across the circle from us, an older Indian couple puttered around in the yard of the for-sale house they were looking at. Somewhere, a dog was barking.

“I need to dump the chili pepper plant,” I said. “It’s given all it’s going to give.”

Most springs I buy a couple of plants with which to test the greenness of my thumb. This year, I bought a chili pepper plant and a tabasco pepper plant. Both produced amazing amounts of peppers (seriously, the tabasco plant has given us literally hundreds of tiny little fireball peppers that are incredible when cooked into things) but are dwindling now that it’s cooling down. The tabasco plant is still covered with ripening peppers, but the other one is nearly bare.

“You know,” I continued. “Now that I think about it, I saw a new pepper on it the other day.”

We walked to the chili pepper plant to find the lone pepper. Only, it seemed to be gone.

“I would’ve sworn there was one here,” I said.

Robyn gestured at the plant. “Up near the top. I remember seeing it, too.”

We looked more closely.

“There it is!” she exclaimed.

I didn’t see it.

“Right here,” she said, and reached for the seemingly invisible pepper.

And suddenly she was screaming, the piercing sound reverberating in the space between our house and the house next door. She leapt back from the pepper plant, her arms flapping, and gave an encore performance of the moonwalk across the driveway. Across the circle, the old Indian man stopped what he was doing to watch my wife shuck and jive.

“What?” I asked, bewildered.

“THAT WASN’T A PEPPER!” she screamed, practically from the neighbor’s yard. “IT WAS ALIVE!”

I still didn’t see anything on the plant. Robyn calmed down enough to come back over to where I was and together we searched until we found–

The culprit.
To see his full glory, click here.

I’d tell you we had a good laugh over it, but let’s be honest. There was no we about who had the good laugh.

Seeing the caterpillar yesterday reminded me of the last time I’d seen one of the same variety. We lived in our last house then, and I was a fat fuck. I got the brilliant idea to plant a small garden in the back yard, and paid a construction worker working on the new house behind us $50 to scoop out an 8×10-ish area with his bobcat, maybe 12 inches deep. Next, I hired the son of a co-worker to fill that huge hole with bags of topsoil I bought at Lowe’s. Finally, I planted tomatoes, cantaloupes, okra, squash, and a few rose bushes.

I was nothing if not optimistic.

The garden was a resounding failure. Packed earth (the yard) is hard; soft earth (the topsoil) is not. As such, every time it rained the garden area acted like a big bowl, catching not only what fell on it but also the runoff from the rest of the yard and turning into a big soupy mess. The plants grew, sort of, but they were listless and limp all the time.

Finally, I’d had enough, and threw in the towel.

“It looks good,” I said, standing there with my arms crossed, doing my best not to look like a sweaty fat person. I supect I failed, as it was mid-summer in Alabama and the sky was cloudless.

“Sure does,” Carrby replied. The sun winked off his gold front tooth when he spoke. Carrby ran the company who did yardwork for us then, the man I’d called when it was time to fill in the garden hole. He and his crew spent the better part of a day working, first pulling up the plants, then taking out the topsoil and replacing it with real dirt one wheelbarrowful at at time.

“GodDAMN!” one of the crew members exclaimed. He was about ten feet from us, on the far side of where the hole had been. He was looking down at an obscenely large green caterpillar laying in the grass near his feet.

Carrby laughed.

The worker stomped on the caterpillar without a second thought. It popped audibly, like a huge pimple, and shot a stream of yellow-green goop across the bare place in the yard. As fast as it flew, I think it would’ve gone a good 50 feet, but it was stopped by Carrby’s leg and crotch, where it tattooed up his pants like a line of fire from a machine gun.

In an instant, his laugh turned into a scream and he hopped around the yard on one leg, shaking the other in a vain attempt to get the caterpillar goo to fall off. He looked like he was at a hoedown.

The goo did not cooperate and fall off.

He finally gave up, and scraped it off with one hand, his face wrinkled in disgust. The rest of us were cackling like goons, and he glared as us as he cleaned his hand by wiping it on the grass.

That was the last time he ever did any work for us.

Yep, all sorts. I met all of the guys pictured today yesterday morning.

And yes, they’re as big as they look.

Want to know a secret? To make them spread and look aggressive, like above, blow on them.