Hail The Halloween Bugs

Right on schedule, they have made their appearance, clustering on window screens and on corners of ceilings, falling into food and making a nuisance of themselves. The only thing I can say in their favor is that they're cute: they are pumpkin-colored ladybugs, not as striking as the true red ones, but far from ugly as bugs go. Still, they drive Vermonters crazy, even crazier than black flies, because of their numbers and persistence.

Need I say that they are not native to the area? They were introduced into this country from Japan to prey on some pest or other and have been making their way up from the south along with the milder winters and hotter summers of this apocalyptic era.

Still, they're not as bad as what Marylanders call “Halloween Bugs” because they too appear at this time of year. Those bugs are in fact Female Box Elder Bugs (“female” modifies “box elder,” not “bugs”). They are about half an inch long, black with (again) pumpkin-colored decorations on their wings. And again, if there were only a couple of them they wouldn't be bad. But they come in hundreds, and make themselves at home in your house, and poop orange poop (I'm not kidding) all over your windows and furniture. Which poop is extremely hard to get rid of.

People around here also complain about “cluster flies” about now, but I'm not sure what those are. Otherwise, bug season is on the wane. The spiders have calmed down in their frenzy to become part of the family. The mosquitoes are long gone. And everybody's hoping for a good hard winter that will vanquish the legions of ticks that hide in the New England woods.

November 23, 2008 "Five Pumpkins"

This fall, one of the strategies I invented against the economic crisis was to scavenge pumpkins. The week after Halloween, people were as glad to get rid of them as my chickens were to eat them. Last week, however, when everything froze up, I noticed that it was taking the chickens a lot longer to eat their pumpkin. It must have hurt their beaks to bang them over and over into that block of orange ice.

Still, when a friend offered her leftover pumpkins, I could not turn them down. They were beautiful pumpkins, bright orange, and not a mark on them. And they were frozen solid. Driving home, I considered the situation. If I put the frozen pumpkins in the chicken house, the hens wouldn't touch them. Then a thaw would come, the pumpkins would get squishy, and the chickens might eat one or two before everything froze again, or the pumpkins rotted. A shameful waste of pumpkins, either way.

I took the five pumpkins in the house and put them on the kitchen counter to defrost overnight. What would I find in the morning? Would the pumpkins deliquesce like Dali watches? Would they explode and spatter everything with juice and seeds?

Next morning the pumpkins still sat, orange and intact, on my blue counter. They were not rotten or moldy or icky in anyway--just a bit soft. No way was I going to throw them on the compost. They were food, filled with vitamins and calories, and somebody—the chickens or the dogs—would benefit from them. But I would have to cook them.

I took a deep breath, sharpened my Chinese chopper, and set my big stock pot on the stove. I chopped the five pumpkins--saving the seeds for the chickens--and steamed them (this took a long time). When they were done, I cooled them and strained them and stuffed them into sixteen quart-sized jars, which I wedged into our overflowing freezer. Then I scrubbed the stock pot in the sink and wiped my brow.

There, I said, that's done! Waste not, want not. That will show AIG and those other malefactors....

But wait. Waste not? How many hours had I spent trying not to waste the five pumpkins? How much of my unique spirit and creative energy had gone into those sixteen jars? “An expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” Shakespeare wrote. He was talking about lust. I am talking about pumpkins. Still, if we're talking economics here, the expense of spirit has definitely got to be accounted for.