One of my earliest memories is being stung by bees while walking barefoot in the clover in the backyard
of our house in Birmingham. It hurt and it swelled–a lot. Later we moved to another home and we
occasionally found black widow spiders in the basement and under every rock in the yard. At our next
house, scorpions invaded our basement bathroom. Well, I know for certain that there was one scorpion that my older
sister reacted to so strongly that I remember it as an enemy invasion. So like many children, I suppose, I
learned fear.
This strong aversion (fear) persisted throughout my formative years. (Who am I kidding? I lived in fear
of creepy crawlies or flying insects through my 20’s.) In 1980 or 81, I was living in a quadruplex apartment in
Montgomery that had a narrow stairwell to the upstairs apartment that was open to the outside. I came home late one night from a party hosted by my team manager and had left the light on. When I started up the stairs, I saw it! A cicada was sitting right in the middle of the stairs, and I just couldn’t make myself step over it. I just knew that if I disturbed it in any way, it would go crazy and do its blind banging against the walls of the stairwell like I had heard them do many times
before. And I was wearing a sundress! So an hour or so later, my downstairs neighbor came home from
a date with a guy I worked with (unfortunately), and he laughed as he “rescued me” from having to spend the
night in my car.
I think my tolerance for creepy crawlies and flying things began when I got married and moved to
Cullman. There were two rows of young blueberry bushes on our property and they started to produce
the second summer we were here. Let me tell you, I got up close and personal with lots of strange
critters when picking blueberries – larvae of all kinds, bees and wasps, spiders, you name it.
Now after 35 years of living and gardening here, I have memories of watching a snake make its way over
my gardening cart to the top of the chain link fence to sun and asking it, “How do you know that I am
not going to use this hoe in my hand to chop you up?” I got stung by a wasp and didn’t die – I itched for
a week but survived. I guess I first fell in love with butterflies around that time and decided to learn what attracted them;
now I have Cook’s Pest Control trained to leave the flower beds untreated.
At the AMGA conference this month, we learned about the importance of planting natives for the native
insects as survival for the planet. Gardens are for growing, and I think I’ve grown up enough to
appreciate this message. Now, I not only tolerate the spider in my mailbox, I talk to him.
