[Afternoon. Outside. The air is full of, whaddyacallem, dust motes. And poplar spore and warm slanting beams of sun with wedges of soft shade between. 'S nice. Palinode and Schmutzie are taking a walk to somewhere or other.]
Schmutzie: Have you seen all the cabbage moths flying around today? [It's true. There's a crazy explosion of the little things this summer. You can't walk a block without a dozen or more fluttering by.]
Palinode: Cabbage moths and wasps.
Schmutzie: Flying around.
Palinode: They're at war.
Schmutzie: What? No they're not.
Palinode: Absolutely. You see all the cabbage moths and wasps out, right? They're at war with each other.
Schmutzie: No. That doesn't make any sense.
Palinode: War doesn't make sense, and yet they still fight.
Schmutzie: You can't just say there's a lot of one thing and a lot of another thing and say they're at war with each other. "Oh look, there's a lot of trees and people, they must be at war".
Palinode: Trees can't fight. They just stand there while we attack.
Schmutzie: That's not exactly warfare.
Palinode: All they do is wave their limbs a bit and fall over.
Schmutzie: You suck.
Palinode: Considering how wussy trees are, you'd think we'd have won already.
Schmutzie: All done listening now.
Palinode: I mean, we've got axes and flamethrowers and farmers and everything. And yet our forests are still overrun with the enemy.
3 comments:
It is a war!! Yesterday I actually saw a wasp attacking a yellow butterfly while in flight--the butterfly finally fell to the sidewalk, with the wasp still tenaciously chomping on its (I presume) head, both writhing around in agony/ecstasy.
I had just said to my two year old, 'Look at the butterfly!!' before I realised it was being murdered before our eyes, and so immediately had to come up with a diversion. Well, it's a little bit of nature for ya.
For some weird reason, the last part of your post makes me want to go listen to Rush.
That was the song about the internecine deciduous warfare, with the maples and the oaks duking it out.
And now I've got that song going through my head. For the rest of the day.
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