Turning, Unfolding, Passing Through

I went on a walk last March with my daughter, picking our way around spring’s effluvia laid out like a carpet on the sidewalk: the crushed top of a hummingbird egg, and a black-and-red speckled insect I couldn’t identify. “It’s a ladybug larva, Mom,” my eleven-year old informed me. “Didn’t they teach you that in school?” They hadn’t taught me that in school. This creature looked like a ladybug rolled into a cylinder and pinched at both ends, a ladybug reflected in a funhouse mirror. 

“Larva” derives from the Latin word for a ghost or evil spirit; it came, by association, to name the masks used in Roman theater. In the seventeenth century, the budding science of zoology borrowed the term to describe the stage in an insect’s life cycle where it is no longer egg but not yet adult: a ghost, or mask, of what it will eventually become. This thing was the mask of a ladybug, its distorted iteration, a flash of what—in the fullness of time—it would turn towards and into.

In spring, on walks with my daughter, we also stumble upon one of the season’s casualties: a dead fledgling sprung from its nest too soon. Bobble-headed, violet eyelids and horny yellow beak, a scrim of pale blue feather-fuzz on its skull. Its body is plump and pink and wrinkled as an earthworm. When I pick it up it is finger-denting doughy, light as a leaf. 

We bury the baby bird underneath the nest from which it leapt, before its prime, before