Nightcrawlers and Catalpa Worms
as kids after a soaking rain we'd go out at night with our flashlights to catch nightcrawlers to take fishing down at the river a few days later once the muddy water cleared the current dropped and the shoreline dried from the soaking rain before we'd put those crawlers in a five gallon bucket filled with dirt and somebody said torn up newspapers and spent coffee grounds worked well for keeping them alive too we'd fill the bucket with all that stuff then put it in the barn where it stayed cooler through summer's droughts than anywhere else but not cool enough at summer's peak to keep them alive no matter how much water we gave them when they died from the heat that mucky bucket of dead worms papers and coffee grounds turned vile as a sickening five pound bucket of stewing deep-summer shit but we knew it wasn't only the heat that threatened for our catch it was the worms themselves that could be a terrible thing too we all knew if you broke a nightcrawler pulling it out of its moist burrow you had to throw that one away cause a dead worm mixed in with all the rest kills the whole bucket in no time flat leaving you with nothing but a putrid bucket full of mess a bucketful of fetid death a bucketful of wasted effort a bucketful of wasted potential left for kids that didn't have much more than their fishing poles don't know why i think so much about nightcrawlers and particularly the bad ones that spoil the whole bucket it's like an itchy throat giving way to a hacking cough easily relieved by a drink but deciding to stay focused on the bad one that turns all the rest to rot instead of all the others that were just fine before the broken one turned the whole bucket bad and this congestion of bad earthworms so easily relieved by a measly shot of spray like thinking instead about catalpa worms that we used for bait too luxurious neon green and black harmlessly horned beautiful and delicate so unlike the lowly nightcrawler glamorous and fickle catalpa worms primed for metamorphosis unlike the ignoble clammy nightcrawler whose repugnant charms i still can't ignore the lustrous caterpillar of ebony and yellowed jade rarely found even back then on the underbelly of leaves among the catalpa tree's beans but now i never see them never at all on any of their trees not even the evidence of their gnawing around the edges of leaves they seem to be all gone which may be the reason i think so much about nightcrawlers now instead of the lovely neon caterpillars anymore
mrobins71 