Preface To Moths: Moth Story

Pardon me, I had a terrible day.  I am not going to talk about it, but I will tell you a story from over twenty years ago.

When I was a bachelor, & lived alone, I wasn't noted for keeping my place terribly clean.  I might vacuum every once in a while, but I lived in pretty grubby surroundings.  But I did shower daily, & I did make sure to have clean clothes.  One time, actually, I overheard a woman I had been dating talking about my "smell."  Afraid of what she might say, I tried to listen in.  She told whomever she was talking to, "Mainly Gary smells like clean clothes."

Also I'm not the most observant person in the universe but one day I did notice what seemed like a stain in the corner of my tub, opposite the shower head.  Most anyone else might have thought to clean it up, not me!  When I saw it from time-to-time, it seemed to be getting bigger.  At some point I realized it may be a cocoon, & so I thought, wow, there might be a butterfly in my shower.

You know because the show this week is about moths that it's going to turn out to be a moth.  In fact, I came in one night & actually got to see the creature slowly crawl out of the cocoon.  Chances are it was actually a brown house moth but I don't remember anything about it - it looked like your average moth.  Mostly gray.  Kinda small.  It just flew away.

That web page says that they're destructive but I never saw another moth in the house again.  Eventually the cocoon fell, & probably washed down the bathtub drain - I certainly didn't clean up there!  But I did glance at the place where the cocoon was occasionally , & thought about the reproductive fitness of that moth - unless it found its way outside my apartment, its genes probably died with it.

& I wondered where the little caterpillar came from, why I never saw it climbing my bathroom walls, why I didn't notice until there was actually a cocoon.  But that was easy to answer, & I did it already: I'm really not that observant.

Being observant is kinda exhausting.