Spinning With Wings

The caterpillar is gone.  I wasn’t the first to notice.  My wife pointed the fact out to me with a sigh this morning.  The caterpillar is no longer in the parsley.  Wow.  We’d had an absolutely beautiful green caterpillar about one inch in length.  I’d photographed him nibbling on parsley and moving from stem to stem.  We’d begun to refer to him as “ours” anticipating the chrysalis he would eventually build, right there on the parsley stem.

This starts a discussion:  what could have become of him?   My wife offered that the Ayi found him and did away with him with a shake into the garbage can.  Could that have happened?  I doubted it.  Perhaps.  We’ll have to ask her.  But what else then?  I had assumed that he or his nose at least were smart enough to realize that the parsley plant was a fine thing to denude.  Once you leave the parsley plant, there is only counter, fella.  There are unforgiving moving objects that can be raised and lowered with abandon.  You have, against all odds been made a pet, and not a pest: do not disturb things.  It only goes down hill from here.  Steeply.

Assuming the Ayi hypothesis is false, then it would appear that instincts and “animal sense’ and the cosmos all failed our little friend who decided to leave the safety of the still verdant, parsley plant to try his luck elsewhere.  Thinking like a caterpillar there are reasons, presumably not boredom, to make you want to leave one plant for the possibilities of the unknown.  First off, the plant you’re on may taste horrible.  That’s fair enough.  If every bite is disgusting, and life is simply eating, I get wanting to vacate.  Worse if parsley was some how toxic to iridescent green inchworms, than leaving would have been an absolute necessity.  But I doubt it.  He was eating away quite happily for at least two weeks.  I don’t believe that parsley was peyesin to him. 

Just now I suggested he was too simple to be bored.  His role was to fatten up and spin a cocoon, not ponder it all. But perhaps you ponder.  Certainly you calculate to go up ad down and find the next leaf and move on from the last turd.  So what I’m left with is: was it a binary decision, left, right, up, down, or was it in fact, a hedge?  The latter suggest more complicated thinking the prior suggests something a bit further beyond protozoan.  

We checked, hesitatingly, behind this book and that pan.  No green smush.  Maybe he is crawling still, convinced, whether in a right, right, right, left fashion, or a “the outdoors is where I truly belong.  It’s my life’s quest to get there.” sort of way, that life beyond the parsley plant was where he needed to be.  Perhaps we’ll meet again if you’ve found a safe place to spin things up and one day emerge from the spinning with wings.  You know best what’s needed to do that.