In which there are bugs!

There was, again, an earwig in the sink this morning. I fished it out and dropped it into the compost bucket on the counter, which is what I (nearly) always do with random earwigs.

I say nearly. I keep a small bowl of flour on my counter at all times. I bake, and pulling down an entire bag of flour just to get a few teaspoons to dust with while shaping a loaf is a pain, so I just leave a bowl out. Last week I scrubbed my kitchen spotless and went to bed, and in the morning there was, in the center of the spotlessly clean long counter, an earwig, absolutely covered in flour, about ten inches away from the flour bowl, just standing there, waving its antennae in what seemed like utter bafflement. I mean, this insect was clearly so exasperated it made me laugh out loud.

I didn’t drop that one into the compost, I just let it be (as it had clearly already had Quite The Day). Who knows where it got to, but I can’t imagine trying to escape a pool of white flour the relative size of an Olympic swimming pool before breakfast.

Anyway, they’re harmless and slow and weird-looking, and I don’t mind them much as they’re sort of little sanitary engineers, with beneficial little jobs, but they tend to always be directly in the damn way. Every single time I’ve gone to pick something — a rose, a tomato, a sprig of basil, fucking anything — there’s an earwig nestled into it somewhere.

Pick a tomato? There’ll be a crack, and in that crack, AN EARWIG. Cutting a rose to put on the kitchen window sill? In between the petals of the bloom, AN EARWIG. Curled up under the basil leaf? AN EARWIG. These little shits are like tiny dumb sheepdogs, somehow.

Apparently they are, like moths, attracted to light, so apparently they amble over to doors and windows at night and somehow make their way inside, maybe on a person’s clothes, or just by walking, who knows, and end up under kitchen towels and things in the morning.

Did you know they live about a year?!