Let me tell you about her.
Matt used to get this mysterious back pain. It would wake him in the middle of the night, giving him absolutely excruciating pain accompanied with horrible nausea. It was terrible. On Cinco de Mayo when the neighbors were drunk and yelling, and there was this guy in the back alley trying to load an offset printing press single-handedly into his pick-up truck, Matt had this pain in such a terrible way that not only did he puke on the floor, but he didn't even care when his cat escaped at 2 am and went running up a phone pole. Bad shit.
It was his gallbladder, we discovered no thanks to his primary care physician and plenty of thanks to my favorite forum on Ravelry. He had the damned thing removed (through his belly button!) on July 5th.
On July 3rd on his way in to work, what should he find sitting on the lock but a bright green baby mantis. He scooped her up, put her in a jar, and brought her home to be his lucky mantis.
She was so wee she couldn't even tackle a meal worm! We put her in a bug net with a potted plant, on the coffee table, and she kept Matt company while he convalesced. She was, apparently, an excellent friend for someone in a Percocet daze. We'd get her a dozen crickets, and she'd plow through them in a matter of two days. She was the Ravenous Cricket Slayer.
She lived a rather exciting life, we think, since the cats wouldn't leave her alone. We never got a photo of her displaying, but when they were being particularly pesky she'd snap open her wings and wave her forearms hypnotically. It was enough to send Bianca backward off the table once.
We gave her all the crickets she could want, and she may have gotten a little overweight... For perspective, her forearm is now as big as that meal worm on the table in the previous picture.
We hoped for a while that maybe she was pregnant, and that was a big old egg sack she was incubating. But no, it was arthropod fat. As she got older, she slowed down and stopped eating so much. She seemed the last couple weeks to live mostly off of her reserves.
This evening, we found her covered in crickets. As prey animals will often do when the predator is ill, they'd turned the tables. She was alive, but barely. So we took her out to the park and bid her a sad farewell.
It's funny how something as small and as strange as a mantis can bring so much joy into a home. She was a deadly huntress, she was beautiful and charming, fascinating to watch, and a central part of our little house for the three months she was with us. She was our first mantis, our lucky mantis who came along just in time for Matt's surgery. And I doubt she'll be the last of her kind to grace our living room.
Rest in peace, Sword Hands.
No comments:
Post a Comment