It isn’t something that I
It isn’t something that I would have thought of, but the very field plants of Italy are different. Aside from being surrounded on all sides with the country sweeping away into the distance and the clouds echoing the hills in the sky, the grasses and insects and plants were of a different sort than the ones that I would automatically expect and thus not see. All that morning, I was picking up a flower or seed pod or pointing at an insect and exclaiming over it. Not many of the others seemed as interested or excited by these new shapes and creatures, but then some of them had been here before.
A surprising number of the plants on the hill seemed to be based on the spiral shape. There was a sort of low-lying, sparse, viny ground cover with little flat green discs for leaves, about the size of a dime. When you pulled on the top of one, it showed itself to be a flat compressed spiral, and when you pulled one apart, it had little flat seeds inside following the ring around the center. There were tiny egg-shaped seed pods that were also spirals, if you pulled the little green string athte top the outer layer would unwind from around the plant. There were flat ovals about the size of my little fingernail that grew in clusters on some dry field-plant, with decoration around the edge that looked like a fanciful frame.
There were a great many insects. Not, for the most part, stinging, which was fortunate. And there were no mosquitoes! It did take a while, though, to get used to the huge beetles my trenchmates called June bugs.
Now, at home, a june bug is a small orangish-red beetle that buzzes around and flings itself at a proch light until it dies. These creatures were moer than an inch long, had wings that more than doubled their size, soudned like helicopters, and were extraordinarily stupid, even for bugs. They would come crashing into you and then fall on the ground. If they had expressions, I am sure they would be ones of baffled bewilderment.
Little, jewelcolored insects would hover in the air. They had what looked for all the world like soft, silky fur, and they had a proboscis for a nose that looked like it came striaght out of a doctor-seuss novel - like a long wicked stinger, only on the front. None of them ever stung me, nor indeed did I ever hear of their stinging at all, so I don’t know whether that was what it was - but they looked almost cartoonish.
I had a friend who found a six inch long June bug in New Mexico.
August 4th, 2002 at 6:37 am