Settling the Score

Fifty years later it's hard to say whose idea it was.  Who, in their right mind, would pass off the responsibility of the class Praying Mantis to the unsteady hands of a 5-year-old kindergarten student?  Is it something I volunteered to do?  Or was it one of those responsibilities that everyone shared?  I remember other kids returning on Mondays with the small cage and insect in tow, so maybe it was one of those "everyone gets a turn" things. 

Did the powers that be know that at my house we'd already said goodbye to my brother's two water turtles?  Did they know that their demise was caused by human error?  I won't go too much into the story just because my mother hates when we talk about the time she left the turtles in their shallow bowl on the radiator...because she didn't want them to be cold.  Yes. That happened, but it was the 60s.  I mean we weren't even wearing seatbelts or bike helmets back then, so it was a survival of the fittest kind of time.

The Praying Mantis didn't make it back to school after the weekend.  Losing that insect was tough.  Back then the word on the street was that they were an endangered species so it was illegal to kill them.  I can't say that I was worried about the legal ramifications of my failed caretaking back then, but I took the loss hard.  In fact, it's one of the top memories of my Kindergarten year.

If only my 5-year-old self could have had a glimpse at the future.  If only I would have known that some thirty years later I'd be given the opportunity to make up for that loss.

I was in my early years of teaching when a colleague brought me what I thought was some sort of odd seed pod to show the class.  If she told me it was any sort of insect egg I wasn't listening because I placed it on top of the back shelf next to a bunch of other science-like artifacts and forgot all about it.  I forgot all about until I was forced to reckon with a cracking insect egg with upwards of one hundred tiny mantises scurrying about. 

The sight of so many tiny mantises crawling all over each other in search of warmth and a chance at life was an overwhelming sight at 7:00 AM.  Once I figured out exactly what was happening I jumped into action and tried to save as many of those nymphs as I could.  I can't be sure of the exact number of survivors but I know it was more than one.

Hopefully, that settled the score.