Stowaway

I travel about an hour to get my hair cut these days. The woman who cuts it was a kid in my class in my rookie year of teaching. Out of the 30 so of them she was the least likely to have become a friend of mine many years later, yet friends we are and I enjoy visiting with her and her family every time I made the trip to get sheared. When I was there last evening her husband remarked that they were being inundated with ladybugs and I saw a few buzzing around the ceiling light in their kitchen. Today, apparently, it was our turn and I saw bunches of the little buggers here and there on the way to work and outside my classroom windows. Today as I hopped on the scooter to go to the bank I saw this stowaway settling down to take the ride with me.

As I rode along she hung on and even walked around a bit, and a few miles out, just when I thought my small rider was going to climb up onto my fingers, she spread her wings and took off. I thought at once of the morbid chant my mom would say whenever we saw a ladybug when I was a lad. "Ladybug! Ladybug! Fly away home! Your house is on fire! Your children will burn!" My curiosity about that line grew the more I thought about it, and I knew I'd have to Google it when I got back here. Not surprisingly, the big G found some references to it, and my suspicion was confirmed: it's every bit as disturbing as "Ring around the rosy" though in an insect sort of way, of course.

I saw a bunch of these things too when I went for my haircut. For the record, if I see one of them mounting the scooter with me, it's getting the boot!